For a few seconds I get a gust of celebrity. And see how sick it would make you if it didn’t go away. It goes away.
Glyn Maxwell
Glyn Maxwell, poet and playwright, records the exultation and despair of the week he launched his new play Liberty at the Globe.
I’ve never kept a diary in my life – the odd January in a kid’s W.H.Smith pocketbook – so I grimly applaud Fate for the joke: hey, keep a diary, pal, for the worst week of your professional life. Et voila.
Tuesday
I'm standing in the yard of the Globe Theatre, where the groundlings will stand. My play Liberty opens tomorrow night. We've had one preview, Sunday evening, complete with inevitable torrential downpour just after the interval: we decided it was a baptism. There are people everywhere: actors, director, producer, choreographer, stage managers, stagehands, musicians, costumiers, make-up artists, administrators, assistants at everything. And tourists. They file in silently with their guides and sit in the galleries. They're told not to take pictures if the actors are acting. Sometimes Guy the director asks them to come down and stand in the yard, so the actors can get used to having people just right there in anoraks, eating. The tourists enjoy being part of the rehearsal. I enjoy it like they do. When I'm needed I concentrate. When I'm not I just watch. Sometimes I feel twelve years old, the beneficiary of some fabulous treat. My play at Shakespeare's Globe. I made it as a poet. I made it as a playwright. I look at the fast-moving clouds and say my little weather-prayers.
Earlier I go into a room with the eight actors and talk to them. I suppose I sort of rally them. I tell them what we're doing is different from everything. Because yes it's verse but it's modern speech. And yes it's modern speech but it's verse. It has metre but not rhyme. Its rules are the same as for Shakespeare - when actors share a line you have to treat it as one line, the space at the end of the line can be fog, death, terror. Lines symbolise breath, lines symbolise mortality. The play is a creature, its lines are the creature breathing, but it doesn't know what they mean. Beyond that I don't really know: there's no book on how to do this modern pentametrical colloquial new animal. I've been working it out for years, somewhat alone. No one else does it this way. It's something I believe is true: this is how verse could come alive on stage, come alive and tell any tale. I tell them, at least, when the years have passed, you'll be able to say you once met someone rather interestingly ill. They sort of laugh. So I say let's go into this with the balls of pioneers, though I don't put it that way. I try to express my pride in them, my awe at their hard work. I suppose I'm telling them we don't know what will happen now. Perhaps I should be listening.
At the end of the rehearsal a shitload of Fleet Street photographers arrive and take pictures of the actors onstage. One of the Globe people asks one of them if he wants a picture of the writer. Who? So this guy takes me into a corner, some little slant of sunlight, and begins snapping away. Some others notice this, and join in. Then they all do. Locusts etc, we know all about this. For a few seconds I get a gust of celebrity. And see how sick it would make you if it didn't go away. It goes away.
My folks and my cousins come to the preview. Lots of people do. Everyone seems to love Liberty.
Wednesday
We have a matinee, then the evening show is Press Night. We are still changing things, moving lines, cutting. I wanted this life. Here it is. Guy the director, Sue the producer, the eight actors, the crew, the company, I feel we've been sailing this ship for weeks, everything else seems distant, glimpsed on a shoreline. I watch the matinee as a groundling. They do it better than last night and the sky stays blue.
In the hours between the matinee and the press night the nerves kick in. I walk round the block, breathing deeply. I pass the plaque which shows where the original Globe was. I touch it with my writing hand, for luck. Twenty yards down the road I realise I should have touched it with my left hand too, so I turn back. I'm not superstitious.
The press night is a blur. Friends, family. Somewhere in the scrum are the critics. I watch as a groundling again, with my friend Alex, another director. He loves it and I believe him. The show's not bad, the weather not great. But the reception is tremendous. I try not to think about the critics, but they can hardly have failed to notice that people laughed and cried where it was funny or sad, or that people cheered at the end.
Then it's all wine and embracing and half-second chats with people you want hours with.
Thursday
We don't expect any reviews till Friday, so I know this will be an odd day, and it is. I have to go on the Today programme, which is a surreal little interlude. After I've had two hours' drunken sleep a BBC car takes me to Wood Lane and I sit alone in a tiny green room, still pissed. I hallucinate that Biddy Baxter, the queen of Blue Peter, walks in and sits down. Maybe I really am twelve and this really is a treat of some kind. Well I think I deserve a Blue Peter badge for getting up so fucking early but instead I just say hello, er, Mrs Baxter. In the studio I answer five questions into a blue foam mike. As I leave the room John Humphrys says cheerily without looking up 'Thanks for coming!' like it's some sort of wine-and-cheese event. I go back to Islington and sleep for hours.
At the matinee Guy says the Standard gave us three stars. 'Okay,' he says, 'but not much for three years work.' I feel a rustle of genetic déjà vu. Fifty years ago my mother acted in the premiere of Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood in the West End and on Broadway. Noel Coward and Marlene Dietrich came to the first night in New York. Everyone said it would run for years; my mum remembers thinking the opposite. And the reviews were poor to middling and it closed after six weeks. So for all my natural buoyancy, I do carry a gene of scepticism. Let's put it this way: of course I can fantasize that Liberty will draw raves and be a smash-hit and we'll drink champagne all day, but have I ever quite believed it?
Friday
I wake about nine. If the Guardian is a great review my folks would have called me by now. So it isn't. That was the one I hoped for most.
I live by a canal in Angel. I decide to go running along the towpath to Victoria Park in the drizzle. Why? To get stronger. To prepare, I realise as I wheeze along past the gasometers and disused factories, for the worst.
I get back around eleven and there's no news of any reviews. I did ask the producers and the Globe and my agent not to tell me anything, good or bad, but I know that if anything was any good, some kith and kin would have phoned up excitedly by now. So I know, simply, that they're bad.
By lunchtime I've had the odd phone-call and know - listening between the lines, reading between the texts - that the reviews aren't bad. They're awful, awful.
I've had a literary and theatrical life full of fortune and happiness and success. And I've never kept a diary in my life - the odd January in a kid's W.H.Smith pocketbook - so I grimly applaud Fate for the joke: hey, keep a diary, pal, for the worst week of your professional life. Et voila.
I vow to myself not to read the reviews, vile or bad, or not-so-bad. I have to be able to keep going. But into that empty space swims every grim imagined insult that can be levelled at me and my work. I don't know what to do.
My sense of the reviews is all gleaned from the reactions of others. Rage, shock, disappointment. And no doubt, a little way over the skyline, satisfaction, schadenfreude, glee.
Whatever I thought would happen, I feel the play is very strong, original, ambitious, different, and the production beautiful. And it's been torn to shreds. I walk along Upper Street, drop into pubs, nod for a while, shake my head for a while, hit the street again, take up smoking again. I spend the afternoon in a high-class dungeon with a new friend and do so much amyl nitrate my nose bleeds. This isn't the same joy as it was to stand in the Globe under blue sky rehearsing three days ago, but, Fortune's frigging wheel be praised, that one's gone and this one's pretty joyful too and it's all I can think to do right now, Diary.
Then I'm in Soho at night in a thunderstorm. I stagger to the French House in the faint hope of knowing someone. I don't, so I just drink loads and stare at the wall. I wonder how long it'll take to get better. And yes drink is poison. But being at the receiving end of spite and scorn and venom and ridicule is poison too, and the body responds on a cellular level - in my case my head just boils with spells in my defence. I see, through a tiny window of clarity, that it's so precarious to live as artists live: to define yourself as that. I'm also a father, an ex-husband, a son, a brother, a friend. But right now I am incapable of speaking to anyone I love. That's a lot of people not to be able to speak to. And every time I hear my mind raving back at the critics I know I am still ill, not better, not right.
Saturday
I got tickets for a friend to see the Dream matinee at the Globe. I said I'd meet her for a drink after. I don't want to be at the Globe, in the rain, after nothing came true, but where else would I go? I walk from Angel, it's fifty minutes and in happier times I love it - Farringdon, Smithfield, St Pauls, the Millennium Bridge, the Thames - London old and new and immortal. This time it's a pub-crawl through drizzle. I feel like Burt Lancaster in The Swimmer.
At some point I run into Sue, the producer, who, like Guy and the cast and crew, have had to pick themselves up and keep on playing the show, rain or shine, happy or sad. She points out that some of them got skewered too - this shit isn't just about me but I'm behaving like it is. I'm utterly chastened by this, as she's sort of right. Then a line from Bob Dylan skewers me too: 'Pain sure brings out the best in people, doesn't it?' Guy will describe this week as a 'learning spike'.
Later I find another pub and watch England play Andorra. It's dull as hell and England are useless, they scrape a 2-0 win. I forget all my troubles for ninety minutes. No I mean really, I do. To paraphrase Alex Ferguson: Men - bloody hell.
Sunday
My folks come and see the show again, with a lot of their old friends from my home town. Apparently the Sunday reviews are okay, but I realise my mum and dad have seen all the worst that was said, because their newspaper, the Guardian, thought it would be fun to assemble all the nastiest comments together. If I'd been asked a week ago to imagine a nightmare ending for this great adventure of mine, that would be pretty much it. My dad says he's kept it. I stare at him: if I got a death-threat, would he frame it in the hallway? But I realise why he kept it. It's a charm for the future, on the day when Time, inshallah, turns these critics to clowns. It happened to the people who slagged off my early poetry. They've disappeared as critics, and they failed as poets, and my poems are in anthologies that start with Beowulf. Maybe I'll read it on that day.
I can hardly speak to anyone.
Monday
With weird timing, my new poetry book arrives. Twenty copies, it looks lovely. Good timing, not weird timing. I remind myself to enjoy this. When I first had a poem accepted, by a tiny magazine somewhere in the Midlands, I was 22: I literally jumped in the air. Last month I sent six poems to the London Review of Books and they took one. I realised my first thought was what's wrong with the other five? Artists are assholes. I will never again take my good fortune for granted.
Then I drive to Sussex to look after my daughter for a few days. Work on the play all summer meant I haven't seen much of her, and I feel guilty about that on top of all this shit. I can't wait to see her. Somewhere around the Blackwall Tunnel I wonder if perhaps everything I have ever written is worthless. Some angel inside me reminds me softly that I've been poisoned, and I drive on through the traffic, poisoned. It occurs to me I would have liked somebody to get through this with. I mean, more than an angel in my head. What I mean is I wish I was in some sort of relationship 'cause this is fucking horrible.
I see my daughter and on a rare day of sunshine we play a great long fairytale in the garden with a cast of a thousand Bratz. I start healing so fast it tickles.
Postscript:
People keep coming to Liberty, people keep loving it. The Globe has supported it to the hilt, as have the six theatres it's touring to through the autumn. The website that gave us our worst review has agreed their critic did an inadequate job and they'll re-review the show. I'm up to my eyes in new commissions for theatre and opera. If people want to destroy me as a writer they will have to work much harder, round-the-clock, double-shifts. Maybe Scooby and Shaggy go one way, Daphne and Velma the other. I can see I'm still poisoned, still reacting, still flailing, but it all passes away and I'm ready to work again. Perhaps there are weeks it would have been sweeter to record, but, Diary, you can have this one.
Thursday, 2 October, 2008
In My week
- Charlotte Grimshaw
- Susan Hill
- Ed Hollis
- Ali Sethi
- Wells Tower
- Con Coughlin
- Dirk Wittenborn
- Kathleen Kent
- Daniel Everett
- Mark Crick
- Glyn Maxwell
- Rabih Alameddine
- Nicholas Hogg
- Charles Boyle
- Mohammed Hanif
- Sarah Hall
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