Melvyn Bragg on The Hired Man
THE HIRED MAN: Melvyn Bragg describes its conception in a newspaper interview of 1983:
NOT THE SOUTH BANK SHOW
As Melvyn Bragg temporarily deserts his South Bank tower for the footlights, Martin Hoyle investigates his return to the musical theatre. This month sees the opening in Southamptonof a musical based on a Bragg novel, The Hired Man – not entirely a new departure, since he collaborated with Alan Blaikley, a colleague in his putative pop career at Oxford, on Mardi Gras, aWest End musical of some years back.
For some this British view of festal New Orleans was as ersatz an experience as Flora Robson donning blackface as mammy to Ingrid Bergman’s creole countess in Sarratoga Trunk. According to its author “it had a respectable run -more than respectable: blooming good. Nine months in the hottest summer ever, without air-conditioning. We played with all the exits open: people were passing out in the heat. But audiences were bloody good. We could have gone through winter, but Bernard Delfont had a previous deal with Michael Crawford and ours was the only theatre available. If you can be nice about taking a show off, Bernard was nice.”
He recalls the event with pleasure. “We had a wonderful time. Some impresario ought to revive it – and get someone to write a better script. No, I mean that.” No false modesty here, as is borne out by his reluctance to return to theatre work. Despite involvement with the SWET panel – “I joined in order to go to the theatre more – and attending 153 events in two years, his first reaction to a second proposed musical was ‘I’d be out of date. I’d be derivative or old-fashioned. Why ask me?”
The invitation came more than two years ago from Howard Goodall, then 21, with, according to Bragg, “one of the most brilliant firsts in music ever”. Son of the headmaster of a comprehensive, he comes of a musical family – “one of those English royal flushes: they all play bloody instruments” – having studied with Simon Preston, with two children’s operas under his belt and music for Rowan Atkinson fringe shows behind him (“I reckon Howard’s music made him”).
Solid musical training appeals to Bragg (‘I love music – I play Beethoven, I sang in choirs’ – his abortive pop career is tactfully forgotten) and provides a contrast with his composer for Mardi Gras: Alan Blaikley managed pop singers, worked on musicals for Anna Scher’s children’s group and has provided background tushery for BBC’s historical By the Sword Divided.
Bragg was obviously struck as much by the lanky Goodall’s chutzpah as by his talent. “This bloody stick-insect came to me and said, ‘I want to do a musical and I want you to write it’.” Bragg evasively made a deal with him. “If you can convince me one of my novels is worth a musical I’ll break it down – on one condition: I’ll do it for no money, have no contract; neither will you. We’ll do it for fun. If one of us dislikes it, he can pull out.” He grins like a cream-filled cat. “I thought ‘That’s got rid of him’.”
But Goodall persisted. He wanted to do an epic and picked The Hired Man. At first the author had misgivings. “I though he’d chosen the worst novel. It has an earthy pre-Gorky feeling; it’s a cavalcade of working-class history so unfashionable it’s out of sight.”
Among the earliest of Bragg’s dozen or so novels, the story was inspired by what his father told the young Melvyn of his grandfather. Covering the period from the turn of the century to after the Great War, it touches on life among Cumbrian farm-workers, mining and embryonic trades unionism, including the war and a pit disaster. “I felt shy of writing the First World War – it’s such a big event,” is a needlessly modest admission from the Head of Arts Programmes, LWT.
“I learnt about it in a convalescent home inNewcastlein 1962.” Recovering from a rugger injury, Bragg was fascinated by the reminiscences of the older patients for whom the catac-lysm of nearly half-a-century before was still a vivid part of their lives. They reinforced the revelatory impact of the First War poets on Bragg’s generation. “I don’t know about you,” he says a trifle sharply; and not for the first time one shifts uneasily beneath that quick, suspicious school-masterly glance: a lecturer checking his listener’s atten-tiveness, perhaps, or a prominent mediaperson wary of being knocked. He sinks back into a characteristic tousled, if watchful, geniality.
As in the novel, the war is depicted through letters written from the front. Another big set piece Bragg regards apprehensively, perhaps more for political than artistic reasons, deals with early labour militancy. “What will they make of a huge number for the Trades Union? Are they going to say ‘You buggered it up?’ or ‘You were right in the first place’?”
After Goodall had gutted the book, Bragg, fortuitously bedridden with a ricked back, wrote the dialogue interspersed with what he felt had to be put into song, and left the lyrics as well as the music to the composer. He admits to being “totally intoxicated” by Goodall’s music. “He’s got too many gifts, in a way.” (Everyone came out of the preview of Bragg’sLakelandfilm trying to hum Goodall’s elusive background theme.) “I loved doing it. I went to the demo recording and joined in the chorus but was taken off the tape. Put that down,” he orders in mock outrage. “Then he said, ‘What are we going to do with it?’ – the moment I’d been dreading.”
There were three options for the completed show. Producer Robert Fox was already interested, so should they move straight into the West End? Bragg was against this, still nervous of the work’s very local flavour and, as he saw it, perhaps old-fashioned themes. Another possibil-ity was a tour of the north, in those “eight or nine cities with damn good theatres” and a public more likely to understand and identify with the northern working-class subject. “We’re taking a terrible risk,” Bragg asserts. Perhaps because he’s not addicted to the musical as a form (“I go and see them now and then,” he admits cautiously) he refers to The Hired Man as “a play with music” or “a drama/melodrama with singing.”
At any rate, caution and a genuine admiration for David Gilmore as a director led to the choice of the third “absolutely perfect” option: a premiere at the Nuffield, Southampton, with its better record than most provincial theatres for exploring new writing, good working condi-tions and regular local audience of guinea-pig southerners. “If it works there – we can learn such a lot we’ll know what to do with it.” Was he about to say, “It’ll work anywhere”?
The authors of The Hired Man have cosseted their creation rather than sending it, naked and newborn, into the commercial maelstrom. It will be worked on, tailored if necessary. “We’ve held it back. We’ve bided our time.” A clue to Bragg’s own priorities when it comes to the musical stage may be gathered from his admiration of at least one recent musical, Blood Brothers. Not only for Barbara Dickson (“You want to bottle her voice – it’s perfect”) but for words and music combined on equal terms, strong story, unabashed portrayal of deep feelings, and the omnipresent sense of social pressures, privilege and struggle, against an awareness of a specific place.
The new musical boasts some set pieces – a work song for labourers, the hiring song that opens and closes the show – but is essentially the story of a young married couple, the hardships they endure, the strains on their relationship, and the effective loneliness and isolation of each. We can look for local colour, redolent of Bragg’s belovedCumbria, but it’s very much an account of young love growing up saddened. Bragg does not underrate the challenge of this “cavalcade of English life, both nostalgic and painful.” He considers the Nuffield a laboratory where they can get the mixture right. “It’s a tragedy, it’s moving; some of it is very funny.” And it is probably caution as much as generosity that prompts him to apportion equal, if not greater, credit for the enterprise to Howard Goodall. “He’s in the driving seat,” Melvyn gracefully acknowledges; “he has been all along”.