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 t h e a t r e

He is one of our most consistent, prolific playwrights; somewhere in the region of twenty plays over the course of the last thirty years. That's not counting the numerous television plays and films he has authored, which have had no difficulty in picking up international film and television awards (the Prix Italia for the BBC's After Pilkington, the Brussels Festival Grand Prix for A Month in the Country) along the way. The cast lists of his plays read like a Who's Who of British Stage Actors. He has a long-term relationship with Harold Pinter (Life Support will be their eighth collaboration), and with Alan Bates, who has starred in five of his plays and three of his television films. Quite a record.
And yet...why isn't Simon Gray embraced by the critics and the theatrical establishment with the awe and admiration afforded to Ayckbourn, Stoppard and Pinter?
Partly, one suspects it's to do with the work itself. It is deceptively simple. It doesn't dazzle you with displays of its own intellectual brilliance like Stoppard; there is none of the stylized ellipsis of Pinter, and there is little of the schematic technical construction that brings Ayckbourn his laughs. Gray's work is at once gentler in its style and more ruthless in its attitude. His plays are peopled by characters who either have been or will be victims of living ("Life, old life itself," as one of the characters says in an early version of The Common Pursuit).
More saliently, the world in which his characters invariably live is often derided as elitist and highbrow, unworthy of depiction on our contemporary stage. The irony being, of course, that those who make this judgement frequently come from that very background. Gray himself is aware of the dichotomy of this situation--and of the paradoxical attitudes to suitable subjects for drama. He once wrote of The Common Pursuit, "If I'd set it in a working man's club, a factory, an insurance office...it would clearly be about something--i.e. real life. But middle class and Cambridge educated is unreal, or anyway impermissible life, elitist, incestuous, who-cares kind of life." This analysis may hold a clue to why so many of his plays receive more ponderous, less favourable reviews than his contemporaries--Gray's plays could be seen as busman's holidays for grouchy critics, off to the theatre in the evening to see a reflection of how their day has been. It calls to mind Alan Ayckbourn's comment that while he was learning his craft from Peter Cheeseman at Stoke, they put on a gritty piece of social realism about hard work and hard life in local working class communities. Having asked one audience member for his reaction to the piece, Ayckbourn received the reply that if he'd wanted to see all that stuff, he could have stayed at home. The Oxbridge educated, white, middle class and middle aged males that form the gaggle of theatre critics may feel the same when confronted with a new Simon Gray play. Audiences, however, tend to disagree, relishing the careful shaping of with and sadness, anger and humour that characterises the playwright's work.

Gray's characters do dwell in a narrow milieu, but complaints like this are a bit like moaning to Mr. Kipling that all he ever does is cakes for heaven's sake, why not branch out into construction or something? It misses the point. Gray is the slightly misanthropic chronicler of what we now label the chattering classes--writers, academics, journalists, literary agents. You don't fall into a Simon Gray play recognizing your next door neighbour (unless you live in Hampstead or an Oxford college) as you might in an Ayckbourn play. what you get with Mr. Gray are beautifully drawn, incisive, often devastating portraits of middle class life. But middle class life in Simon Gray is less glib than in Ayckbourn. It's a life of realities, of an existence when the shine has worn off and other people are too often a trouble to be dealt with, obstacles to overcome in pursuit of some other happiness. It's a quintessentially English view--that life hasn't lived up to what might have been promised--and Gray is a true English playwright. Failure and sadness haunt his plays, not least Life Support. Hovering behind the facade of sly repartee and cracking one liners is pathos; but never sentimentality--Gray is too sharp and caustic an operator to allow his audience a schmaltzy wallow. His characters are never pitied, or judged, merely observed.
What people all too often fail to appreciate about Simon Gray is his technical mastery, his thorough grasp of the possibilities and technicalities of the theatrical medium. Like Ayckbourn he is a man of the theatre, although he came to it later in life, just after he'd begun his career as an academic. His directing work feeds into his writing and vice versa--he knows what is possible, where the flourishes should come (such as with the set change that heralds the Epilogue of The Common Pursuit). He is as comfortable arguing over sets as he is over sentence construction, a writer who is involved in all aspects of production from the very first casting sessions onwards. He is a cool negotiator and canny diplomat, offering advice to actors on acting, from behind the mask of the playwright talking about the text. And yet through it all, he argues that directing a play is no black art, merely requiring--he is clearly half-joking here--"powers of concentration, instinctive sympathy with actors, and a natural dash of authority."
Equally interesting is Gray's refusal to accept the traditional author's cover of hiding behind his plays. Unlike his director, the author seems happy to leave himself open to inspection, some would say dissection. He is a demon diarist, three volumes published (An Unnatural Pursuit, How's That for Telling'Em, Fat Lady? and Fat Chance), mordant, witty--a right old moaner who paints himself in a dreadful light yet winks at you through his prose--although in a foreword to An Unnatural Pursuit, Pinter notes that "Actually, he's not nearly such a pain as his self-portrait would have you believe."

Reading the diary gives you tantalising glimpses of the man. He is of Welsh descent. He lives in Holland Park, taught for twenty years at Queen Mary College before becoming a full time writer. He is a dog lover and cricket buff (like JG in Life Support) but disapproves of the dress code at Marylebone Cricket Club. He dislikes being photographed, believing he usually ends up looking "portly and lesbian." He smokes, although How's That for Telling'Em, Fat Lady? details his dalliance with nicotine gum in a fruitless attempt to give up. He doesn't drive. When he stays in New York, he likes Suite 310 of the Algonquin and a video installed. He is a movie fan, particularly Westerns. His love of films shines through at even the oddest moments.
He enjoys, positively cultivates, an attitude of grouchiness. Sometimes these different aspects collide--a trip in a vertigo-inducing hotel lift prompts the recollection of the movie, The Towering Inferno and his opinion that the film was "deeply satisfying" as he was "on the side of the fire and regretting only that it didn't manage to make a clean sweep of all the special guest stars." such a persona is carefully cultivated throughout the diaries; the grouchy playwright caricature is carefully delineated, with glints of self-deprecating irony ("I like to think I live most of my life in a state of controlled paranoia") railing against all and sundry, whereas the artist in control of his craft is relegated to the sidelines in favour of the rows and crises that inevitably surround theatre productions. He is hard on himself ("It is extraordinary," he writes of his capacity for complaining, "this aspect of myself that is bad enough at home but becomes far worse when I'm abroad and on my own") and his plays--happily labelling one of his own vintage works "such a boring and repellent little play."
Maybe this willingness to disparage his own personality and work openly and in print goes some way to explaining why he remains undervalued in British theatre. He is a writer who continues--despite artistic rows and sometimes critical indifference--to write for the purest medium, theatre, when he could head for the cash cows of TV and film. As is the way of things, it is likely that he will be positively re-evaluated when he stops writing, whether through death or creative exhaustion. For the moment however, this new haunting and affecting play will no doubt swell the ranks of Gray loyalists who appreciate that very British response--laughter in pain.