In 1957, a young London copper suffered an injury (just a busted ankle) which could have had him for the time being employed on “light duties” – assisting the station officer with desk-work, answering the telephone, that sort of thing – but he decided to resign from the best Police Force in the world until he was fit enough to resume beat duties. Already he had started using his spare time to study Theatre, so now he could join a repertory company for a short period of recovery. On return, mended, he was posted to a police station near Battersea, where he resumed his Theatre studies.

O.K., so that was me, nearly fifty years ago.

It was just the other evening, watching the Chelsea Flower Show on television, that so many memories were stirred. My patch was on the other side of Chelsea Bridge, so we handled a lot of the traffic and the bloody parking, but it was the last day that compensated, when our local kids would trundle their wheel-barrows over to the Royal Hospital to fill them up with flowers, plants, turf, equipment… anything that could be moved. In those days the exhibitors gave everything away when the show closed while, nowadays, it gets sold. There were wonderful gardens behind those modest terraces in Nine Elms.

It was something that one of the star horticulturalists said during this year’s show that stung ‘Jonah’ back into print. Mr. Green-fingers had assembled a miraculous display of vegetables with which he won a gold medal and several other awards. Glowing with pride, he enunciated his seed company’s slogan: “We aim at perfection, but are satisfied by excellence”. Listening to his account of his career, it occurred to me that I may have helped him park his van so many years ago.

What hit me harder, however, was that he and I had pursued similar quests for excellence, he in cultivation, me in a different sort of culture, he successfully, me with occasional moments of satisfaction, but we both had our standards.
It has therefore offended me over the years whenever my standards have been attacked or eroded in any way. In my handbook for directors, I try to make my position clear: that one has a duty to achieve the highest possible standard with the talents, energies and facilities at one’s disposal. I have therefore been affronted whenever I have seen any theatrical location (be it The Old Vic or the church hall) with all its equipment, its box-office and advertising campaign and an entire rehearsal schedule of good people’s effort, including (perhaps even ‘especially’) the construction of a set and acquisition of props and wardrobe… the full works…all wasted by incompetence, laziness or self-indulgence. It has grieved me most of all when a loyal Audience has been treated with contempt, even when the chosen material has been in any way worthwhile.

Always, I have maintained that “material is everything”. One seeks for the most ambitious and exciting play on which to work with whichever company is using one’s services in whatever capacity. Begin with a sow’s ear and it is extremely unlikely that one will finish up with a silk purse. It therefore follows that if one selects the right materials and craftspersons with which to fashion an exquisite silk purse, then one stands a chance of presenting the Audience with an attractive handbag.

So, I think back over my fifty-odd years in Theatre to identify the disasters I have witnessed – even those with which I have been involved. I recognise a common factor in every one, best summed up as: Self-indulgence. Someone has decided to forget their responsibility to “inform, advise and entertain” (Lord Reeth’s stated objectives for the British Broadcasting Corporation, when it was formed) for the benefit of our hard-won Audience, in order to seek some sort of selfish personal satisfaction – to “get one’s rocks off” at the Audience’s expense.

Twice, among the canon of plays I have written, I recognise two little works that were contrived merely to illustrate some personal grudge, both of which I engineered into performance, one of which I directed myself. Both were bloody awful and the Audiences recognised them as such; I deserved no better, but my team-members and certainly our Audiences did, much better – my best.

The saddest aspect of that small recollection is that those two mistakes have left a clearer and more lasting impression on my memory than all those dozens of productions which culminated in warm applause and compliments.

Then, there were productions by other people in which it was hard work to remain quiet in the auditorium when I really wanted to leap up, stop the action and put the actors back into rehearsal.

In 1970, while attending the BTA full-time course for directors and teachers of drama, we students were encouraged to attend as many performances as possible, not that we needed any coaxing. On one occasion, I attended a well-known theatre with an American colleague and his wife, where a young company were performing “The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui”, a play I was looking forward to experiencing. After the houselights went down and the stage lit up, there was an ineffably long silence in which we could become accustomed to the sight of a mountain of used toilet paper which rose beside a lavatory fixture. At length, a fat man, naked, exploded out of the mountain to announce several times what it was that stained all those sheets of paper. The rest of the pre-interval section of the play comprised a resistible descent into worse of the same with more people involved, but none who could justifiably call themselves actors. I declined to join my friends for the second act and, I think, derived more erudition from reading the headstones in a nearby graveyard.

My colleague was displeased with me. In rebuke, he said that when I paid the price of admission to any performance I accepted a responsibility, to which I replied, “No, when I pay the price of admission, THEY undertake a responsibility”. Not long afterwards, he resigned from the course because he felt that his fellow-students were providing him with insufficient intellectual stimulation. Mia culpa.
There have been amateur productions in village halls that have had me squirming with embarrassment for the reputation of Amateur Theatre, but I think many of the performers were doing their best. I have been less forgiving, on checking the programme, when I have discovered that the same name appears beside “Director” (or “Produced by…) and the choicest acting part. Any director who appears in his or her own production is inviting disaster.
Material is everything.

Given an exciting and ambitious play, perfection is possible. To illustrate this, I recall how seven young actors dressed in black sat on two benches, then rose in appropriate groups – or individually – and provided the most riveting performance I have ever seen of ‘Hamlet’. I always insist that, to attain good communication, every moment must work theatrically, dramatically and realistically. On an absolute shoestring that young group gave kings’ ransoms of value.

However…

I note with trepidation a current trend, particularly among performance groups attached to universities, to ladle out large grants of money from available funds (e.g. The Nuffield Foundation) into the gaping maws of untrained and often untalented persons. You will deduce from the opening paragraph of this article that I come from an age when five percent of secondary school students considered themselves very fortunate to continue into university, so I am jealous; yes, too right I am. These days, every dumbo with a couple of passes is entitled to expect advanced education; that’s the way it should be.

But they cannot expect to be indulged and subsidised in every aspect of their self-gratification for ever. With so much excellent literature available for exploration and… (dammit, I’ll say it because it expresses what I mean) …elevation of the soul, I see the presentation of untutored scribblings. Often, some beardless teenybopper, thwarted in a virginal experimentation, pours its vitriolic reaction onto paper and serves it up to a gullible public.

If this could be achieved at no expense in a non-theatrical situation – say, by seven young actors dressed in black, sitting on two benches – such an adventure would rightly be encouraged. Throughout my career in active theatre, I took delight in shocking my Audiences at every opportunity. Indeed, they expected it of me. But, apart from the two instances already mentioned, I did not use my players, my technicians, my ticket-buyers or my performance locations to indulge myself in narcissistic gratification.

I repeat: material is everything.

Further: let the young EARN a right to express themselves after a process of work, study, exercise and experience under the guidance of experienced practitioners who know of what they talk.

Above all, let them never forget that the feelings of their Audience are paramount and sacred. Mistreat them and the bums will stay off seats, the people will stay at home watching television when we need them in our theatres.

Yet… casting my mind back fifty years, I think about that young gardener with his lust for perfection and that fresh-faced little copper who was sure he would become a famous theatreman and… O.K., so I had already played the Shrew Kate, directed Dream and started writing comedy, but, if someone had offered me a surefire short-cut…

I make no apologies.

Jonah was a very experience director, teacher and writer who sadly passed away in February 2006. He was also the author of the highly successful "Playmaker - The Craft of Directing Plays (The Way I Seen It)".