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1975
Evening Standard Drama Award: best play of the year

Variety Club best playwright of the year, best actor

Plays & Players: best play of the year

"Otherwise Engaged" is not the kindest play in London; but it is the most entertaining and the most brilliant.

Harold Hobson
Sunday Times

Alan Bates, always at his best when on the receiving end, has never been better or more subtle.

Frank Marcus
Sunday Telegraph

Harold Pinter's direction keeps the pace chilling and crisp with Alan Bates alert to every degree of desiccation.

Nicholas de Jongh
The Guardian

A play of truth and insight; a play to savour.

Punch

t h e a t r e

Otherwise Engaged, by Simon Gray
(Simon Hench) 30.vii.75 Queen's Theatre, London
directed by Harold Pinter

HAROLD PINTER led the way out of the stage door, followed by playwright Simon Gray, producer Michael Codron and actor Alan Bates. They merged unnoticed with the Soho lunchtime crowds. A remarkable theatrical quartet, by any standards.

Together they were responsible for the hit play "Butley." Now they are working together again on Simon Gray's new play "Otherwise Engaged," which opens next week in Oxford on a pre-London run. Pinter again the director, Bates the leading actor and Codron the producer.
Bates came to lunch with me to talk about the new play. The others went off together to L'Etoile. Interviewing him is not easy. He is always amiable and charming but at the same time reserved, reticent. He was wearing a green denim jacket and a black silk scarf tied round his neck. He wears dark glasses in the street but enjoyed being recognised when he took them off as he posed for a photograph and a girl went by and smiled at him and said "I liked you better with a beard."
"The character, Simon Hench, is a publisher and he is the converse of Butley (the alcoholic homosexual)," said Bates. "Butley really destroyed himself. He was a wreck. This part is someone who won't be a failure. He copes while the people around him don't. In the course of a day through a series of confrontations he finds himself. I don't really want to say more than that.
"Is he sympathetic? Yes, I find Simon Gray's characters sympathetic, although there is savagery in them and honesty in their presentation. I do find this character sympathetic, although, funnily, I reacted against Butley at first. I didn't like him. I thought he was a mess and a monster.
"Harold Pinter as a director? He is an actor and a writer and as a director he's there for the sake of the author and the actor and at the end that's what the word director is about. He's there to present the play written by someone else, not to try and say he's the great wizard of all time. I learnt that from Lindsay Anderson. Harold does have an affinity with Simon Gray."

"I've just done two other plays by Simon Gray for BBC-TV with Dinsdale Landen, directed by Michael Lindsay Hogg. One is called 'Plaintiffs and Defendants' and the other is 'Two Sundays.' The two plays evoke each other and have the same theme. In one I'm a solicitor and in the other a teacher. They are beautifully written comedies -- Chekhovian in a sense, although perhaps that's not the word. They are bitter sort of comedies."
Richard Lester's film "Royal Flash," in which Bates co-stars with Malcolm McDowell and Oliver Reed, has its press showing next week. "I haven't seen it. I may come up from Oxford for the press showing. What's the atmosphere like with the critics there? The film was kind of fun. I was in a situation where I was knocked out from filming "In Celebration" all day and playing in "Life Class" in the evening and then jumping suddenly into a 19th century white costume and start fencing.
"I'm the villain in the film. It's a sort of 'Prisoner of Zenda' situation. I've honestly forgotten what the story is. It's pure fantasy and it should have a lot of fun and charm. Richard Lester is a bit of a wizard with that sort of stuff.
"He's very fast and works quickly; sometimes too quickly for me. I'd just come out of two extremely naturalistic pieces. It was like going from hot to cold. A film of that kind is made under such pressure of time and money they tend to accelerate in the making. This has its advantages -- where there is a slight risk involved Richard Lester perhaps works best."

We talked about Lindsay Anderson who directed Bates in the film of David Storey's "In Celebration" which has been widely praised in the United States. "I went to see the film and at the end I just thought 'If I've done nothing else, I've done that.' It is a marvellous realisation of a script."
"In Celebration" was made in the American Film Theatre series (as was "Butley," starring Bates, directed by Pinter and also a major success in America). "I've just heard the series has been sold to Britain so the films will be shown finally in London."
I said I'd heard it reported Anderson was trying to ensure the first night house for his production of Orton's "What the Butler Saw" at the Royal Court was not composed almost entirely of the press. "I wish we could crack the sense of occasion of first nights," said Bates. "Break the situation where it all has to happen on that one night. First nights rarely take off. I've only had two that did. One was 'The Caretaker,' which was fantastic. Perhaps the audience had come along saying 'Who is this Pinter?' and there was not the sense of occasion to begin with.
"There is only a hair's breadth between a successful performance or not. I'm not nervous when they call the half-hour on an opening night but then at 10 minutes to go something starts going on. You don't know whether you are going to free-wheel or not. On the first night of 'Butley' the lighting went wrong and I wondered if I should go off and start again. Then I decided to keep going and I realised after five minutes I was all right, not nervous, because I'd been thinking of how to deal with the situation I was in.
"But it is only a hair's breadth. It can also be much harder when someone close to you is in the audience and they know you're doing your tricks." |||

Review

Keeping chaos at bay with words
Irving Wardle, The Times, 31.vii.75

In what one takes to be a rare treat in the life of a busy publisher, Simon has cleared a day to spend alone at home listening to a recording of "Parsifal." We see him open up his treasure, slide out the first disc and surrender himself to the music; at which point a loutish Scot barges in to dismiss Wagner as a fascist and touch his host for £5.
He is the first of the series of intruders who halt the record-player until the end of Simon Gray's play. In order of appearance, they consist of Simon's schoolmaster brother, a drunken critic, a ruthless girl writer, an embittered old schoolfellow, and Simon's unfaithful wife. To their insolence and grovelling he replies with unfailingly serene courtesy. And that drives them to inarticulate fury.
The visitors' list, you will notice, is mainly educational; one factor that links this piece with Mr Gray's "Butley." Both comedies ask the same question: what is the use of education and culture if they produce a tribe of messy, self-destructive, egotistical and unhappy people? Practically all the characters have been damaged by books.
Dave the Scot supports his sponging and threats with ideological self-righteousness. Education has changed Stephen the schoolmaster into a worm who has to purchase his promotion by swallowing the head's herbal tea and nut cutlets. For Jeff, the critic, it has turned what was once a pleasure into a torment, so that he speaks of writers only with snarling contempt. Davina, researching an episode in Victorian corruption, is ready to betray anyone and sleep with anyone to get her book published. I suspect that even "Parsifal" has not been chosen by chance; and that if the unspeakable Richard Wagner had turned up among the guest,s Simon might have shown him the door.
Such, at any rate, is my reading of this ambiguous play. As Alan Bates plays him, voice carefully pitched midway between benevolence and irony and making an extended pause before reluctantly disclosing anything about himself, Simon is not an easy target for sympathetic identification. He is far less immediately appealing than the anarchic Butley, who gives himself away in handfuls. But, to lift a favourite quotation from John Osborne (with whom Mr Gray has a good deal in common), both characters share the belief that "words alone are certainly good."
Try telling Simon that he is uncaring and indifferent, and he starts analysing the terms: "Indifferent as in the sense of an indifferent wine?" His wife tells him that she and her lover want to live together as husband and wife. "Husband and wife?" he repeats, raising his eyebrows. This is not pedantry but the response of someone who has seen the connexion between verbal imprecision and messed-up lives, and who wants no part of it.
The play is there to test how effectively one can live by kindness, diplomatic honesty, and keeping squalor off one's own doorstep. Up to a point it works very well. Simon has cleared himself a space where he can treat people with good will without getting too close, and escape into the one uncompromised human territory of aesthetic expression. He also knows how to defend himself; and some of the best moments in the production are those when, without any alteration to his urbane mask, he tears another presumptuous visitor to shreds.
But in the end, the posture lets him down. His seductions, kept outside his circle of friends, still lead to a suicide attempt. Having taken in the appalling Dave as "a poor third to recent births and imminent deaths" he finds himself afflicted with a tribe of squatters. And having excluded children from his marriage, he finally learns that she is pregnant. After that, the return to "Parsifal" rings rather hollow.
For a character so intent on a sense of order, the structure of the play is extremely implausible.
It consists entirely of unannounced comings and goings, one following the next according to no cause beyond the playwright's convenience. Harold Pinter's production duly drives it home with thunderous slammings of the outer door. Otherwise his direction allows each encounter to flower in isolation while maintaining the ceaseless clamour of importunity battering on the hero's skull. Oblique poise in relation to [the] outer world is an obvious point of affinity between the author, director, and leading actor.
Among the invaders, Julian Glover contributes an ultimate Bush House roaring boy, Jacqueline Pearce a liberated bluestocking whom it is a real pleasure to hate, and Benjamin Whitrow a sadly accurate study in arrested sexuality. Eileen Diss's set presents an image of careless affluence inviting an act of desecration. |||

Review

Desert islands
Harold Hobson, The Sunday Times, 3.viii.75

In Simon Gray's "Otherwise Engaged" (Queen's) Simon (Alan Bates), in the witty urbanity of his detached mind, is the West's fine flower after the life-blood has departed from it. Like Anouilh's Becket, Simon loves no one, not even savages. He endures them -- as in the persons of the illiterate sociology student and the drunken critic who periodically visit his suave apartment in search of comfort -- easily enough: for in the midst of their crises his mind is otherwise engaged. It is otherwise engaged also in his own crises: nothing can disturb his serene and analytic wit -- not his brother's anguish, nor an old school-fellow's despair, nor his wife's desertion, nor the bare, offered breasts of a young lady just down from Oxford. Mr Bates's cool and slow rejection of this temptation is as cruelly humiliating a demonstration of moral purity as anyone could desire to see.
Structurally "Otherwise Engaged" is the brilliant converse of Alan Ayckbourn's "Absent Friends." Everyone comes to comfort Ayckbourn's hero, though he is in no need of comfort. Gray's hero, on the other hand, is in most desperate need, though he does not know it himself; all his visitors are themselves in search of comfort. In Simon Mr Gray has in fact drawn the portrait of a man who is absolutely, and at all points, invulnerable: if he has a weakness it is the comparatively trivial one of thinking that it was Sophocles, and not Socrates, who married Xantippe. This inconsiderable error naturally enough does not trouble the smooth surface of his impregnable calm; it is the tragedy of his life, of which he is unaware to the point of sublimity, that no storm can ruffle him. He is the sort of man who, had he believed in God, might have withdrawn into a monastery. Left in the world he is polite to everyone; and his effect is deadly.
Harold Pinter's (above, with Alan Bates in rehearsal) merciless direction of the play gets very fine performances from Nigel Hawthorne, Benjamin Whitrow, Julian Glover, Mary Miller, Jacqueline Pearce, and Ian Charleson; and as Simon Mr Bates listens and destroys with a supreme authority. As one might expect from Mr Pinter there hangs on Simon's wall a small portrait of someone I take to be Alfred Mynn, firmly holding a very straight bat. But it is not Alfred Mynn's world that the play surveys. "Otherwise Engaged" is not the kindest play in London; but it is the most entertaining and the most brilliant. |||

Simon Gray Interview

Gray, Pinter and Bates: a triangular alliance
Ronald Hayman The Times, 26.vii.75

A triangular alliance of some importance has been formed between Simon Gray, Harold Pinter and Alan Bates. After directing Alan Bates in both the play and the film of "Butley," Pinter is now directing him in Simon Gray's new play "Otherwise Engaged." In the autumn Alan Bates will be appearing on BBC Television in two other plays by Simon Gray, "Plaintiffs and Defendants" and "Two Sundays."
"The first time, Harold and I got to know each other; the second time we know each other. Explanations become less explanatory. You don't really need to conclude all your sentences. We've made very few changes to the text of this new play; but all the changes have been quite decisive ones. They've altered slightly the shape of a scene, which means that the shape of the whole is slightly altered. These things aren't matters of command or arbitrary judgment; they're matters of exploring, testing out, feeling forward. This is what a good director does, and I thought what he did with "Butley" was marvellous."
He thinks Alan Bates is the most human actor of his generation. "I recognise in his face so many faces, and so many of his gestures seem to me immediately human. There's a gorgeous vulnerability about him. I've never actually written a part for him. It's never crossed my mind when I was writing, but it makes perfect sense. In the new play it's a very different part from Butley."
Some of "Butley" was filmed at Queen Mary College, where Simon Gray teaches. One day Pinter told a group of extras that in a minute they would see Alan Bates coming through the door over there, carrying a briefcase. He would look at them balefully, smile and walk past. A minute later Simon Gray, arriving late on location, walked through the door with his briefcase, looked at them balefully, smiled and walked past.
The main character in the new play is called Simon but he does not regard Alan Bates as an alter ego. He does not even think there is much resemblance between himself and any of this characters, though several of them have been teachers. Nor should their affairs, homosexual and heterosexual, be taken to have any bearing on his own sex-life.
"Infidelity's become very much a factor -- or is dramatically discussed in one way or another -- in my television plays, and it's in this stage play. I'd hate to think that what it's all about is that I'm preparing myself for one. The television plays are about what I imagine it to be like. But it seems to me that the view taken is fairly gloomy. There doesn't seem to be a great deal to an infidelity, but it must be much more difficult than you'd make out from conversations or novels. Questions arise of how you get home. If you make love, then you smell. This small practical detail seems to be the heart of the problem. It's really another way of discussing ways in which you can actually lie to someone you live very closely with and love. what it's like to be constantly lying to your wife.
"Freud said one writes for fame, money, and the love of women. I write because I've always written. I'm a habitual writer, almost like a chain-smoker. I must always be working on something. The great thing about writing is that it's bloody private. The door's closed and you can sit spinning the hours, the days, the years away. Or something can come out of it. But at least it's a way of getting away from things. I had no interest in the Theatre until I came to write a play. I used to write novels and I wrote a short story that was published in a volume called "Winter's Tales." I'd recently married, and we never watched television, but Ken Trodd, the story editor of 30-Minute Theatre, asked whether I'd sell the rights of the story to BBC2, and, after close interrogation, revealed that whoever did the adaptation would be paid more than I would for the rights. I said 'In that case I'll sell the rights if I'm allowed at least to try to do the adaptation.' And it turned out to be extremely easy because the story was written almost entirely in dialogue.
"He then commissioned me to write a Wednesday Play, so we bought a television set and found out how these things look, at least, and I did a play called 'The Death of a Teddy Bear.' What I remember is a really superb performance from Hywel Bennett. He did awful expressions of puppy conceit and sulkiness. The I showed a draft of 'Wise Child' to the story editor, and he said there wasn't a chance they could do that on television, so my agent sent it to Michael Codron."
Many of Alec Guinness's fans were outraged to see him in drag. "Somebody asked for his money back in the interval because he said he'd paid to see Alec Guinness and he hadn't appeared. Two American ladies sat doggedly through the first act and in the second, one said 'There's something very wrong with that boy!' The other said 'Yeah, but the mother, she's got problems too'."
However much he earned from writing, Simon Gray would still want to go on teaching. "I've always been in universities since the age of 17. I went from being an undergraduate to being a research student, supervising and lecturing. People never seem prepared to believe that you think it's worth doing, but to think it's more important to write than to teach, you have to be very sure of your contribution to the world. As a teacher of English in the university one is primarily concerned with keeping books alive, making sure that generations go on reading Dickens and George Eliot. I read a lot and I suppose that becomes as fully as possible a part of one's experience, what one is."
In the theatre he thinks that some of the finest actors, like Olivier and Brando, must be sexually attractive to both sexes, even to men not normally attracted to other men.
"But I could never understand the assumption that Butley is homosexual. He sleeps with women, though his closest relationships are obviously achieved with men. But the assumption that he and Joey became lovers strikes me as extraordinary. All I mean is that there are many ways of being attracted and wanting to possess, and the usual sexual way seems to me the least interesting, though for Joey it's the most important, because he's a homosexual and wants to be. The things that Butley wants are far more intricate. It's certainly in some ways bound to be sexual, though the sexual act itself is quite irrelevant. In a real sense I think he loves Joey, but that doesn't mean he has to have slept with him. You present the facts in a way that seems dramatically to be true.
"I don't believe there's such a thing as technique in writing. The only technique I've managed to develop slightly is appearing to overcome disasters. You've still got to smile at your students." |||

"The latent pederast"

In Simon Gray's "An Unnatural Pursuit & Other Pieces" (1985 St. Martin's Press), a journal he kept during the writing and production of "The Common Pursuit," he says this about "Otherwise Engaged":

"During the early rehearsals of 'Otherwise Engaged' Alan Bates and Nigel Hawthorne were physically incapable of getting past a moment when Nigel Hawthorne, playing a minor- public-school teacher, had to step forward and announce aggressively, 'I am the latent pederast.' Both Alan and Nigel doubled up with laughter again and again. Weeks later, when the same moment arrived before an audience, they were bewildered by its reacting exactly as they once had done. Within a few nights they'd not only come to expect the response, but had incorporated it smoothly into their performances, and might even, if they had been less puritanical performers, have found themselves milking it by prolonging it a little." |||

Ian Charleson Tribute, by Alan Bates

"I MET IAN when we were both in Simon Gray's "Otherwise Engaged." It was a particularly happy company. Ian played a surly lodger who took everything for granted and was very bolshy to the landlord. He was marvellous in the part and was immediately accepted by everyone. Though he was the youngest in the cast-still in his early twenties-and it was his first time in the West End, he wasn't overawed. Nor did he play at being the gauche young man. It was simply that, without being arrogant, he was quite fearless and had a natural ease with everybody. ... " [read more]

IN EARLY 2004 the executive director of the Banyan Theater, in Sarasota, Florida, contacted the Bates Archive, saying that the theatre was planning a summer performance of "Otherwise Engaged." The production was to be dedicated to the memory of Alan Bates; would I provide a program note?
I was happy to comply. Much of what I wrote comes from this page; but I also drew on my own memory, since I saw the original production shortly after it opened. This comment might amuse you:

The play earned a number of London theatre awards in 1975, including the Evening Standard Drama Award for best play of the year; the Variety Club awards for best playwright and best actor; and the Plays & Players award for best play. In a lasting tribute, I can report that there is today a large framed photo of Alan Bates as Simon Hench hanging next to the mirror in the Ladies at the Queens Theatre. When I told Alan about it a couple of years ago, he roared with laughter. |||