INTRODUCTION

Charles Wood

I never saw the two plays comprising Plays for England when they were first produced at the Royal Court in 1962, but I wish I had, and when you read The Blood of the Bambergs and Under Plain Cover I’m sure you’ll feel the same. They are however, said to be the first time that the Royal Court lost money on John Osborne. “(His) magnetic name failed to overcome the English playgoer’s resistance to double bills” (Irving Wardle, The Theatres of George Devine, 1978).

John Osborne describes The Blood of the Bambergs as a fairy tale, and says in the second volume of his autobiography (John Osborne, A Better Class of Person, 1991) that it is “simply a broadly satiric account of one of the permanent fixtures of English life, a Royal Wedding” and that “It seems a good idea to match the shuffling pantomime of contemporary royal fantasy with the real, romantic thing.”

The Blood of the Bambergs

The Bambergs are a royal family, very like the Windsors but still very Germanic. They have obviously had no reason to change their names – which removes the First World War, when they might just have been mistaken for the other side, from their history – and Prince Will in this play is a Wilhelm not a William. Sadly, for he appears to be a perfect prince for England, ruthless and a simpleton, he dies on the way to his wedding – driving his fast sports car along a motorway specially cleared of all obstacles, the only way he can usually be trusted to arrive anywhere in one piece. This time the system has failed him, he has hit a concrete road block put in place for his protection from lesser drivers, and Princess Melanie is in danger of being left at the altar.

With a little help from Anthony Hope – someone John Osborne was happy to plagiarise for he, like many of us, loved paddling in the pools of Ruritania–two killings and an Australian cameraman who discovers he has Bamberg blood (if somewhat diluted by its washing in the womb of a “pretty little thing, blonde, very blonde… She was the only blonde he ever had”) a solution is found. All the cameraman needs to do is shave off his beard, let his large Bamberg ears flap loose, his huge Bamberg nose find its newly elevated level and the throne of England is safe.

Princess Melanie doesn’t mind much for it seems she is bored. It is boring being a royal, very very boring: “you’ll crumble and disintegrate with boredom. Your blood will rush with constant hot and cold running boredom.” Our cameraman is undeterred, he’s after the loot, and there’s enough Bamberg blood left in him to make sure that he’ll see very little beyond the length of his quite long nose even when Princess Melanie chillingly cries: “Oh, my God, I am so bored… and most of all, I am bored with you, my people, my loyal subjects, I am so bored that even this cheap little Australian looks like relieving it for a few, brief moments, now and then, in the rest of my lifetime.”

When first produced The Blood of the Bambergs must have seemed to owe more to The Prisoner of Zenda than the spectacularly dull home life of our own dear Royals, and note that in 1962 it was still expected that royals would embrace the Ruritanian notion of marriage for the rest of life.

Now, in 1999, several royal weddings, divorces, catastrophic indiscretions, extraordinarily bad choices of mate or lover, numerous incidences of bull-headed Bamberg-like insensitivity and stupidity later, we must surely view our own Royals in a very different light and thank God that they have broken loose, thrown down the gauntlet of their insecurity before us, shown us their despair and their incompetence, put themselves well beyond being entrusted with real power ever again; become the Republicans I’m sure they have always secretly longed to be.

Which leaves us with Lt-Colonel Taft and his ilk. In the play Taft is a loyal servant and a murderous much-decorated thug who looks on the royal family as “A whole way of life. We are its servants, instruments of order, decency and all the things that have made life honourable and tolerable for a thousand years.” He and his like are not going to be happy with their collapsed world.

It isn’t the poor sad inconsequential royals we have to fear – they only really want to be left alone to their comforting charades, infidelities and adulteries like the rest of us; it’s the cloak-spreaders looking for the puddles of advancement, and the self-righteous assassins, who use the promise of honour as ruthlessly as a pistol to destroy creative subversion.

John Osborne was never offered an honour of any kind but I’m certain he would have accepted one; after all, to laugh and say yes is the perfect antidote to such poisonous temptings.

(Incidentally, when looking up just how many royal weddings there had been between the Second World War and 1962 I came across a curious honour granted to Princess Margaret. She is, believe it or not, “the only member of the present Royal Family other than Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother to hold the Royal Victorian Chain” (The Royal Encyclopaedia). I wonder who did it for her before?)

Under Plain Cover

In 1737 the Stage Licensing Act was passed, and from that date all plays had to be read by the Lord Chamberlain’s Office before being given a licence.

John Osborne, like most English playwrights before 1968, was very familiar with the walk up St James’s to the Palace for an ex-Grenadier Lt-Colonel’s expert “You can’t pull the wool over my eyes laddie!” view, on such monumentally important issues as the amount of “rodgering” and talk of “rodgering” to be allowed before being granted a licence to perform. With a little planning we might all have met like tour actors on a railway station platform in Crewe on Sunday, to swap and hone our euphemisms.

He was mildly relieved that the Lord Chamberlain’s Office had found nothing to complain of in Under Plain Cover but George Devine, the Artistic Director of the English Stage Company at the Royal Court, was “bemused by St James’s Palace’s lack of response to the repetition of ‘knickers’ some forty-five times in less than an hour” (John Osborne, A Better Class of Person).

In Under Plain Cover, Tim and Jenny play their games and rehearse their own private neuroses in a manner at first amusing and then achingly sad. The repetition of the word “knickers” reaches a stage where you long for it not to be said, because with every repetition it becomes more revealing. Then their secret is out. They are not the happily married young couple with two children they seem to be. The tabloids are on to them, their “human interest story” is splashed across the front page and they are driven apart. The respectability of public confession and redemption through embracing the mundane is thrust upon them by a reporter looking for a sensational front-page photo to satisfy his editor.

Their story is the stuff of high romance, the real stuff, and the real devotion beneath the paraphernalia of ambition and convention and role playing that is progress through life. John Russell Taylor saw it as the fourth act of Look Back in Anger; “what could have happened to Jimmy and Alison a few years after they were reunited.”

Watch it Come Down

A few years ago I stood at the two-weeks-old grave of John Osborne with another playwright of my long acquaintance and he asked me if I thought the plays “would live”. It seemed to me to be an impertinent question and I still think so for if any proof is needed of the timelessness of John Osborne’s plays, a reading of Watch it Come Down should suffice. I saw the play when it was first produced at the National Theatre in 1976 and remember particularly the touching performance of Michael Gough as Glen, who waits in the old parcels office of a one-time railway station for death, while his friends scar and trash each other and themselves in the real waiting rooms. It is he who provides the forlorn title: “It said ‘Blenkinsop–Demolitionists. We do it. You watch it. Come down.’”

Charles Wood
London 1999

THE BLOOD OF THE BAMBERGS

a fairy story

Characters

WIMPLE

LEMON

BROWN

TAFT

WITHERS

RUSSELL

FOOTMAN

WOMAN

MELANIE

THE BAMBERGS

FIVE JOURNALISTS

ARCHBISHOP

The Blood of the Bambergs was first performed at the Royal Court Theatre, London, on 19 July 1962, by the English Stage Company. It was directed by John Dexter and the film sequence was by John Dexter, Desmond Davies and Tony Gibbs. The décor was by Alan Tagg. The cast was as follows:

Act One: Late one night in the Cathedral

Act Two: Scene 1: A room in the Palace early next morning

           Scene 2: The Cathedral later that day

ACT ONE

Before the altar of a large Gothic cathedral In the wispy yellow light of an empty cathedral, a boyish-looking, portly man of middle age is staring up around him in well-groomed humility. As a few hollow hammering sounds die away he turns to the audience, coughs discreetly into his sleeve and speaks in an easy, sober and confidential voice. Around his neck, nestled against his ample silk shirt, is a small microphone. In his hand he is carrying a larger one. His name is PAUL WIMPLE. In a corner, seated and leaning against some scaffolding is a casually dressed, bearded young man about thirty. Around his neck hangs a Rolleiflex, and he is lighting himself a cigarette. He looks bored and exhausted.

WIMPLE: Those sounds you heard just then echoing far, far above my head here and dying away in the secret corners of this great cathedral were probably the last sounds we shall hear from this place tonight.

(There is a reverberating clanging of tubular steel on stone and a muffled shout.)

Oh no, I was wrong, someone else is still here. That sound you heard was the strange muffled noise of men working, working into the night, whilst most of the country lies –(Another clang and more hollow shouts.) – lies sleeping, quietly, patiently and with love – I think I may say, quite unselfconsciously, with love. They have been labouring into the night in preparation for the tremendous events of the morrow. For what they are doing is, indeed, a labour of great love, as great as that which impelled those men seven centuries ago when they applied their ancient skills and crafts to the building of this great cathedral for the remembrance of man and to the glory of God. For in a few hours’ time – twelve and a half to be exact – and on this very spot, the moment which millions of people throughout the world have awaited with such expectation will arrive and two very famous people will be united in holy matrimony; and united amid all the pomp and splendour that a proud and grateful nation can provide on such occasions for her most illustrious ones. On this very spot where I am standing now – no, a little more to my left I think, if I am not mistaken. Anyway, I shall be talking to the Archbishop himself in a few moments and I have no doubt he will very soon put me right. But as I say, on this very spot where I am standing now, in the tremendous, rather severe perhaps, but tremendous hush of this great cathedral where kings and queens and noble princes are interred, where there is no man honoured who was ever mean – as a great poet once put it – in this place tomorrow, at a little past one o’clock we shall be privileged to watch the most solemn occasion in our national life – a royal wedding. Yes, Princess Melanie is to marry Prince Wilhelm or, as I think we might venture to call him, as they all seem to do, at least in this part of the country, our Prince Will. Our Prince Will will – Wilhelm will – be the first royal bridegroom to have walked down this magnificent nave for over a year and what a thrill it is when we remember those many happy – and solemn – but happy occasions. It is well perhaps to remember them, for as I say, looking around me now, into the lofty recesses of this soaring, gaunt and ancient house of worship, it is difficult to believe that shortly this still, silent place will be the very centre of such glorious splendour, such colour and trappings, such grandeur and, yes, I think I must say again, such solemnity. The last arrangements have been made, the vast technical complications have been tied up. Television cameras have been hoisted into their resting places, the last workman has put away his tools and all that is left is silence – silence, that is, except for my voice. There is something strangely unreal about it all. Silence and space, but in that very space is something living, tho’ it be silent. Perhaps it is even possible to hear it. If you listen carefully. If there is a place anywhere at all tonight where it might be said that this nation’s heart beats it must surely be here – where I am standing now – but before we finally take our leave tonight, I should like you to meet some of the people who have been responsible for the arrangements of the morrow. Months of intricate planning go into these arrangements and tonight we have here just one or two of these people who have dedicated themselves to this task. (LEMON enters.)

They range from, shall I say, the humblest – no, not the humblest, for his job is an extremely skilled one, no – rather from the proudest of living craftsmen to some of the highest in the land. First, I have with me here Mr Charlie Lemon. Mr Lemon is the foreman in charge of all the workmen, the workmen whose – work – we have heard going on or, rather, coming to a close. Mr Lemon, it must be a relief to you to know that your part in all this is virtually over?

LEMON: Well yes, I shall be quite glad to get home and put my feet up, quite frankly.

WIMPLE: But you must feel a tremendous sense of achievement to have finished everything in time?

LEMON: Oh yes, I do.

WIMPLE: What exactly is it you have been doing?

LEMON: Well, mainly seeing to all the seating facilities, etcetera, and supervising the erection of spectators’ stands outside the cathedral itself as well as many of the more important stands all the way along the route.

WIMPLE: I see, well that’s certainly what you would call a very responsible job indeed.

LEMON: Yes, well, it is really, I suppose.

WIMPLE: Very responsible indeed. Tell me, Mr Lemon –

LEMON: Yes?

WIMPLE: How long have you been engaged in these preparations?

LEMON: Oh, months.

WIMPLE: Months, really?

LEMON: Oh yes, months and months.

WIMPLE: And how many men are involved in this work?

LEMON: I have under me at the present time nine hundred and forty-seven, that’s if my memory serves me right.

WIMPLE: Nearly a thousand men and what are they?

LEMON: What do you mean, what are they?

WIMPLE: I mean what do they do?

LEMON: Oh, there are builders, carpenters, electricians, plumbers and all sorts.

WIMPLE: Craftsmen of every kind in fact, and all working at top speed for months.

LEMON: Years, really.

WIMPLE: Years?

LEMON: Most of the men engaged in this type of work are employed on what is in fact a more or less permanent basis, although there was a falling off a year or so ago after the Coronation, but then it picked up again recently. Of course, as you know we’ve had two funerals and one christening; that is a lesser occasion for us, of course, on this side anyhow, but they are still much more elaborate than they were a few years ago.

WIMPLE: (Brings LEMON farther down stage.) So you have been yourself a specialist in this work for quite some considerable time?

LEMON: Yes, you could say that. I suppose about seventeen years on and off. On mostly.

WIMPLE: That must be an almost unique record.

LEMON: No, no, I wouldn’t say that. There are lots of chaps, dozens I should say, who were in it with me from the beginning, you might say.

WIMPLE: The beginning?

LEMON: Yes, from the beginning, the earliest beginnings of the industry, from the time that it ceased to simply be an ancient craft and became the thriving, modern industry that it is today. You see, when I started, it was never much more than a part-time job, practically all casual labour.

WIMPLE: And do you think, then, that conditions have changed a great deal?

LEMON: Oh yes most definitely and emphatically.

WIMPLE: In what particular way, would you say?

LEMON: Principally in the – in the – in the –

WIMPLE: In the status of the individual workman, I imagine.

LEMON: That’s right, the status of the individual workman.

WIMPLE: In the pride, in fact, of being employed in such a vital, thriving and forward-looking industry?

LEMON: Yes, I should say that, yes.

WIMPLE: And would you, for instance, recommend a young man about to start his working life to enter this industry? For example, would you, encourage your own son to go into it?

LEMON: I would, most definitely, as a matter of fact it was my son who laid the carpet you’ve been standing on.

WIMPLE: Well, I must be careful where I put my muddy boots then.

LEMON: Yes, my son is now chief assistant in charge of all carpet-laying arrangements.

WIMPLE: You must be a very proud man, Mr Lemon.

LEMON: Oh yes, definitely. He has always been a good boy.

WIMPLE: I wish you could see this carpet, ladies and gentlemen, in the flesh as it were, beautifully laid with infinite love and skill.

LEMON: Always been good to his mother.

WIMPLE: (Crosses to LEMON.) I’m sure. And there is really nothing else you would rather have done in life?

LEMON: Nothing.

WIMPLE: Nothing at all?

LEMON: No, I think I can say that quite honestly and sincerely. Of course, I am only responsible for one small section of the industry, but I think I can honestly say, in all sincerity, that in all the time in which I have been associated with it I have never been tempted to do anything else.

WIMPLE: One last question, Mr Lemon.

LEMON: And what would that be?

WIMPLE: Is it true that the working hours in your industry are far longer than the national average?

LEMON: That is true, Mr Wimple. That is true. But you must remember this. There is a very special benefit which – comes out of simply – the privilege of being a worker – in this industry.

WIMPLE: Yes.

LEMON: That is to say, Mr Wimple, a man who has a special pride in his job, a man who knows that what he is doing makes a difference to the world he’s living in, who knows he’s making a vital contribution to the greatness of this country. That man is a happy man, Mr Wimple, and a contented worker, and for why? I’ll tell you for why. Because he is a fulfilled man, and how many people in these troubled times can say that today?

WIMPLE: (Down to LEMON, crosses to his left to take him off) All too few, Mr Lemon, thank you.

LEMON: (Warming up.) I myself, just in my section mind you, I have calculated that during the past seventeen years in which I have had the honour to do this job, I could have built, using the same materials and labour, you understand, 27 secondary modern schools and 1,200,000 houses.

WIMPLE: (Pulls LEMON off.) Thank you, Mr Lemon.

LEMON: Thank you, Mr Wimple.

WIMPLE: Now, as I told you earlier, I am to have the privilege of talking with His Grace the Archbishop himself. In fact, it was first arranged that we should have a filmed interview earlier today so that it wouldn’t be necessary to impose too great a strain on him just before – the momentous events of the – morrow, in which, of course, he is, what you might call the leading actor. Apart from the principals that is. Naturally. (ASSISTANT enters left of WIMPLE. Hands him a note.) However, His Grace was unable to come and talk to me as we had arranged, owing to his overlapping commitments in which, of course, his religious, that is to say his formal religious activities must inevitably play a part. Well now, someone has just handed me a note saying that His Grace asks to be excused from our meeting tonight as he is still deeply immersed in the preparations for his own vital role. (ASSISTANT goes out.) You might think that by this time such a thing would hold little terror for an old, experienced hand at the game but this, of course, is to ignore, or at least to devalue, the overwhelming spiritual burden involved. As any actor will tell you, the three-hundredth performance of Hamlet may well be the most trying and taxing of all. A familiarity may breed, not contempt, but despair. I am sure you will join with me in wholeheartedly wishing His Grace good luck for yet another first night. (WIMPLE moves down stage.) It is now–er–by my watch, eight minutes past twelve and according to our report here the Prince is at this moment speeding along in his car to be in good time at his appointed place tomorrow. As he drives along, like any other young man in his powerful sports car – and the Prince is a very fine, skilful and fast driver, as I have reason to know, I have watched him on several occasions – as he drives along, I wonder what his thoughts are. Well, that we shall never know of course, but although he will need to keep his mind on the road, just like any other young man – he will, no doubt, be(Brings BROWN from left. Assembly to left centre.)