The Smell of the Greasepaint

When the great actor-turned-director Michael Blakemore died in December last year, aged 95, his obituarist on the BBC reminded listeners that, as well as being the collaborator of choice for the play wrights Michael Frayn and Peter Nichols, the guiding hand behind A Day in the Death of Joe Egg and Noises Off, a double Tony-award winner for Kiss Me Kate and Copenhagen, the almost-head of the National and the actual and much-fêted head of both Glasgow Citizens and the Lyric Hammersmith, he was a gifted and iconoclastic author. Personally, the commentator said, his favourite book about theatre was Blakemore’s Stage Blood (2013), a coruscating, vengeful memoir of the author’s five years as an associate director at the then nascent National Theatre.

The choice was a surprise. Not because Stage Blood is a bad book: quite the opposite. It unspools in relentless and at times almost tragic detail how, in the early 1970s, Blakemore’s idol Laurence Olivier lost control of the institution he had worked tirelessly to create, and how his successor Peter (later Sir Peter) Hall then changed it from a national repertory theatre based around a permanent company of actors to something more commercial, more star-driven and, Blakemore clearly felt, less artistically valid. He makes a passionate and convincing argument for theatre that means something, and in those extended sections describing how he painstakingly pieced together defining productions of, among others, Long Day’s Journey into Night and The Front Page, shows just how that kind of theatre can be achieved. He also mercilessly and at times very funnily dissects the character, morals and artistic (in)abilities of Hall, a lifelong antagonist. The surprise stemmed more from the fact that the obituarist ignored Blakemore’s two other books: one a lengthier and less one note memoir, Arguments with England (2004); the other, the novel Next Season (1968), often cited as one of the best books ever written about the stage. Taken together, his oeuvre offers a fascinating, sometimes combative but ultimately convincing explanation of why a life spent playing make-believe is ultimately one well-lived. Yet Blakemore never intended to be a writer. Born in Australia between the two world wars, son of a successful if emotionally distant eye surgeon and his well-off, sheep-farming wife, he had decided while still at boarding school in Sydney that he wanted to be a film director. After an unsuccessful stint at medical school, he talked himself into a job as PR man for the rumbustious British actor Robert Morley, at the time on tour in the Antipodes; Morley, liking the young Blakemore’s ambition and spotting some kind of incipient instinct for the stage, wangled him a place at RADA. And so in 1950, aged just 22, Blakemore left Sydney, working his passage to England and to drama school as a ship’s steward. He quickly made Britain his home, rejecting the colonial provincialism of an Australia that was then still the unsure offspring of ‘a parent who shows little interest in his child’, and didn’t return for seventeen years. By that time, he’d spent almost two decades as a minor actor slog ging around the repertory theatres of his adopted home, going head-to-head with directors who he thought were doing a bad job, and nudging his way towards becoming a director himself. Meanwhile Next Season – inspired partly by his time spent acting for Tyrone Guthrie and a young Peter Hall at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, and partly by his hubristic sense of ‘how few books there were that gave a true sense of acting as work’ – was sitting, almost finished, in his back pocket. Though it took Blakemore eight years to write the book, its plot is slight enough. A youngish actor, Sam, lands a summer season at a provincial theatre that’s part Stratford-upon-Avon, part northern seaside rep; he does well in one show, not so well in another, has a couple of affairs and then, it seems, gives up acting for good. Yet in its delineation of passionate if evanescent attachments played out in damp bedsits and at Dubonnet-fuelled parties, and in the close attention it pays to the process of creating theatre – as well as the cool, almost brutal honesty with which the author anatomizes his characters – Next Season hooks from the off. Once published it was an immediate hit with theatre people, who spent time in the greenroom discussing whether the leading characters ‘were’ Charles Laughton, Peter Hall or Vanessa Redgrave. (The answer? Yes, mostly.) Nonetheless it went out of print after a couple of years and wasn’t seen again until 1988, when Faber released a paperback edition, ornamented with an admiring introduction by Simon Callow. This was the edition I bought when, as an Eng. Lit. student exploring the idea of going to drama school, I was hungry for clues about what being an actor might actually involve. This it provided, in multiples. A few years later, when I had my own crack at a summer season – at Scarborough, with Alan Ayckbourn’s rep – I recognized exactly how accurate his depiction was, from the grimness of seaside B&Bs and the obsession with your own lines to the excitement of uncovering the key to a character, the intra-company jockeying for position and the directorial mind-games. But there was something more: a certain seriousness, a refusal to succumb to campness. Blakemore himself complained that most fictions set in the theatre treat it as alluring, but also slightly despicable and often silly. Even great theatre novels like Penelope Fitzgerald’s At Freddie’s, Mikhail Bulgakov’s Black Snow or Beryl Bainbridge’s An Awfully Big Adventure are guilty at times of sneering at the world they paint. But in Next Season, Blakemore’s belief in the validity of theatre – even when he acknowledges its frailty and foolishness – is absolute. Almost at the same moment that his novel was published, Blakemore’s career as director took off, with a production in Glasgow of Peter Nichols’s first stage play, A Day in the Death of Joe Egg (1967). A revelatory, shocking hit about disability and parenthood, it transferred first to the West End, then to Broadway, and launched its director into the stratosphere. Blakemore, now busy on the other side of the footlights, put down his pen and wouldn’t pick it up again for almost forty years. We should be glad that he did. Next Season might be the crisper read, Stage Blood more Grand Guignol, but Arguments with England – published in 2004 and covering the whole of Blakemore’s personal and working life from childhood in Australia until 1970, when he was invited to join the artistic team at the National – is meatier, going backstage, nosing around in the scenery, filling in the gaps in the plot. It offers various pleasures. You could read it just to spot which of his experiences and relationships fed into the novel. More rewarding is to unravel the psychology of a creative life: what drove him to keep going through the disappointments of his acting years, why shoddy work so frustrated him, what fuelled the extremity of his fury about events at the National. What, in fact, fuelled a whole series of furies. At one point Blakemore claims that he didn’t often lose his temper, but the truth is his life was studded with Vesuvian explosions, whether backstage, front of house or in the boardroom of the National. Meanwhile his relationship with women, though never violent, became so compulsive and complicated that at one point it nearly killed him. Where did all this turmoil come from? Here’s a hint. His cold, sexually magnetic, war-scarred father was married three times, used to get spiders to kill each other for fun, and told his son, on the point of leaving for drama school, that he ‘had a pretty good idea of what it takes to make it in the theatre. And you don’t have it.’ Freud aside, perhaps the most rewarding way to read Arguments is as a log of the high points of mid-twentieth-century theatre, whether Peter Brook’s spare, muscular Titus Andronicus, Zeffirelli’s reinvention of verse-speaking in Romeo and Juliet, Moscow Arts bringing Stanislavsky to London, the arrival of the Angry Young Men, or the weary, post-Suez cynicism of Laurence Olivier in The Entertainer. In his description of these, Blakemore powerfully combines a director’s eye for detail with a novelist’s knack for portraiture and an actor’s technical understanding of what makes a performance work. I challenge you to find any better evoker – and it really does feel as if he summons his presence – of Olivier the stage actor. When Blakemore describes, over the course of two pages, Olivier’s delivery of the ‘I am the sea’ speech from Titus, he tells you exactly when and how the great actor took breaths. That’s something even the best theatre critic would omit – yet knowing that detail, you can almost hear Olivier speak. Running through all this is a kind of communal hopefulness, a belief that theatre can map what Blakemore calls humanity’s ‘inner terrain’. It comes, I think, from those rare times in shows when, as he puts it,

there was something building in the company, a good faith, which absorbed personal ambitions and discontents and put them to better use . . . Literature and painting testify to what individuals can achieve . . . but the theatre is about what can be done within a group and then what an even larger group can collectively experience. At its best it always expresses hope, no matter what the play itself may have to say.

This may be why so many actors lean politically to the left; successful or not, their work is always a group endeavour. And a brave one. When you know, as Blakemore does, how terrifying it is to step on to a stage, how vulnerable even great actors are to an awareness of their own potential vulgarity, how easy it is ‘to puncture the presumption of an artist – to slash a picture, burn a book or humiliate a performer’ – it’s a miracle anyone puts on a play at all. ‘No wonder,’ as he says, ‘the question people in theatre are always asking each other is “what are you doing next?” There is not much safety in the past, none in the present, but in the future it can at least be imagined.’ In its combination of cool intelligence and emotional understanding this is typical Blakemore. His turn on the stage may be over, but he has left us a panoramic exposition of the full, greasepaint-and-despair reality of life in the theatre. Along with the knowledge that there is, one hopes, always next season.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 87 © Isabel Lloyd 2025