Playwright Peter Nichols on revival of his Born in the Gardens at the Oxford Playhouse
3:45pm Wednesday 6th August 2008
'They're glad to see the back of him," playwright Peter Nichols explained cheerfully, as he described the recently deceased father figure in his comedy Born in the Gardens. "He built and ran a business called Cleansweep, it was a brush company like Kleeneze. It became a very successful local business, so they live in this great fake Tudor house in Bristol.
"As the play goes on we discover that he wasn't a particularly nice man. I haven't fully imagined him - I've imagined him in spasms. I think that's true of the play itself. When the actors started delving into it, I said: Be careful, you might find there's nothing there.' "I don't always logically work things out, and provide a biography for everybody. The play takes place at his funeral: it's a pretext for the brother and the sister, who both live away, to come home for the funeral."
Nichols, the author of A Day in the Death of Joe Egg and Privates on Parade, among many other plays, was himself born and brought up in Bristol. Eighteen months ago he and his wife, Thelma, moved into a bright and airy flat in North Oxford, the principal attraction of which, he told me, was an efficient lift - on the day we met, Peter was about to celebrate his 81st birthday, although he seems at least 20 years younger. A little piece of Bristol has followed him to Oxford: on the wall are two highly atmospheric paintings of the city's Empire Theatre. Demolished in 1963, the Empire was apparently not somewhere you appeared unless all else failed. Peter fondly remembers seeing the singer Al Bowlly there in the twilight of his career.
First produced in 1979, Born in the Gardens, has been revived by Theatre Royal, Bath, Productions, and tours to the Oxford Playhouse next week. Peter calls it a domestic comedy, but unlike some of his other plays, it doesn't draw greatly on his own experiences.
"To tell the truth, the mother character, played by Stephanie Cole, is the mother of the man who did these theatre paintings you've just been looking at. I never met her, but it's based on some things he told me about her. It's also based on my own auntie, who was called Maud, the name of the character, and there are also little bits of my mother. It's a collage, I tend to stick bits together."
Certainly Peter's own father doesn't seem to feature in Born in the Gardens. His parents were, however, influential in his decision to go into the theatre - first as an actor, then as a director and playwright.
"There were one or two antecedents. My dad was an amateur entertainer, and my mother sang. She and I went out during the war, and sang to the poor, defenceless members of the armed services, who already had enough to cope with. I recited Stanley Holloway monologues. I also had an uncle who booked artists for the Bristol Hippodrome. He would get on to Dad, and say: Could you go and see this act, and give me a report on it.' "The last person to ask was my father, who was motivated by jealousy of anyone who was up on a stage. He was also a puritan, and lifelong temperance man - no drinking, gambling, swearing, or smoking - and no dirty jokes. Of course, the acts would always include dirty jokes. Dirty jokes? By today's standards, they contained only the mildest of innuendo. He'd slow handclap right there, and shout: Get off'. Can you imagine my embarrassment as a teenage boy? I included it in my play Forget-Me-Not-Lane, which was about my family during the war.
"There was a moment when I was courting Thelma, and I decided she ought to know what she was in for. So I read her an early television play I'd written, as we sat in the garden of the house I grew up in. Dad walked round outside the garden wall, throwing fallen apples on to us. It was exactly like facing the audience at the old Glasgow Empire."
Peter Nichols has acquired a bit of a reputation for being awkward - indeed this is referred to in Charles Spencer's Daily Telegraph review of Born in the Gardens. Referring to Nichols as "one of the most criminally underrated of British dramatists", Spencer continues: "He ought to be a national treasure . . . but somehow he isn't, perhaps because Nichols has always been a paid-up member of the awkward squad." I asked Peter what he thought of this remark. His reply came accompanied by a healthy chuckle.
"I wish they'd stop saying it, because every time I get to be more of an awkward squad'! People say: Don't have him, he's awkward.' But for years I haven't done that, it's a bit of a journalistic cliché now."
The 'awkward' reputation was first earned, it seems, when there was a highly public row over the production of his play Poppy.
"It led to a bit of a conflict between the director and me, because he tried to make it into a swish musical. What I was doing really was to write about the pantomime of my youth, which was somewhat tatty I suppose - although the Prince's in Bristol was a very grand theatre, they could afford decent stars there."
It's hardly surprising that Peter should feel strongly about the matter, for pantomime has always been one of his greatest loves.
"At the age of five I was taken to see a pantomime at the Lyceum, with Florrie Forde. It was in 1933, she must have been ancient by then. Naughton and Gold were on the bill too, doing the Brokers' Men. I nearly died laughing, I can remember rolling about on the floor in the aisle. Later I went to pantomime and variety in Bristol, anything that smacked of the theatre. I was completely stage struck - and also film struck. I loved circuses too."
Born in the Gardens runs at the Oxford Playhouse from next Monday until Saturday, August 16. Tickets: 01865 305305 (www.oxfordplayhouse.com).