![]() I didn’t set out to write an autobiographical play, but the parallels between Rita and me seem glaring now. But what the audience really want to know is, ‘Do me and Rita go to Australia?’” So I quickly rewrote the ending as it now. One day Mark Kingston, who was playing Frank, said: “Listen, it’s smashing, your take on the nature of education. I’d done a terrible, tub-thumping political speech, summarising everything the audience had just seen. I was rewriting the ending right up to the wire. The rehearsal period was one of the best I’ve ever had, but it must have been a nightmare for the actors. But Peggy never got over her first reaction: from then on, she always referred to it as “your little play”. I sent my first draft to my agent, Peggy Ramsay, and she said: “She’s marvellous, dear, but he just doesn’t fucking exist.” So I dragged myself back upstairs, put some fresh paper in the typewriter, and rewrote Frank. But Frank, the lecturer who teaches her, was just a cipher. She was this voluble ball of energy and hunger and vivacity – she sucked the air out of everything. And then one afternoon in November, in the midst of that increasing desperation, Rita just walked on to the page. I even rang up the RSC to ask them to take the advance back, but they wouldn’t. I tried out all kinds of things but, by Bonfire night, I still hadn’t properly got started. I went to her father’s place – a big old Victorian house with a library – to write every day, as a break from the kids. My wife Annie was pregnant with Rachel, our third child. And that’s why I’m staying.I set aside four months, from September to December. I said, ‘Why are y’ cryin’, Mother?’ She said, ‘Because- because we could sing better songs than those.’ Ten minutes later Denny had her laughing and singing again, pretending she hadn’t said it. So we did, an’ on the way home I asked her why. ![]() Everyone just said she was pissed an’ we should get her home. But when I looked round me mother had stopped singin’, an’ she was cryin’, but no one could get it out of her why she was cryin’. Well I did join in with the singin’, I didn’t ask any questions, I just went along with it. (Angrily) You think I can, don’t you? Just because you pass a pub doorway an’ hear the singin’ you think we’re all O.K., that we’re all survivin’, with the spirit intact. An’ I stood in that pub an’ thought, just what the frig am I trying to do? Why don’t I just pack it in an’ stay with them, an’ join in the singin’? I went into the pub an’ they were singin’, all of them singin’ some song they’d learnt from the juke- box. I went back to the pub where Denny was, an’ me mother, an’ our Sandra, an’ her mates. An’ I can’t talk to the likes of them on Saturday, or them out there, because I can’t learn the language. I can’t talk to the people I live with anymore. I’m all right with you, here in this room but when I saw those people you were with I couldn’t come in. ![]() Well, she can’t be like that really but bring her in because she’s good for a laugh! Me? What’s me? Some stupid woman who gives us all a laugh because she thinks she can learn, because she thinks one day she’ll be like the rest of them, talking seriously, confidently, with knowledge, livin’ a civilised life. I didn’t want to come to your house just to play the court jester.(.)īut I don’t want to be myself. I wanna talk seriously with the rest of you, I don’t wanna spend the night takin’ the piss, comin’ on with the funnies because that’s the only way I can get into the conversation. (angrily) But I don’t wanna be charming and delightful: funny. ![]()
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