The devil you know
Carl Jung sits in his lighthouse and there's a knock on the door. It's Sigmund Freud with a patient, a tall but huddled mess of humanity wrapped in a greatcoat. Freud admits defeat: he has tried and failed to analyse this patient. Freud needs help, but the old animosity rages; they argue about conflicting theories and techniques. The patient gives the occasional sub-human moan...
This is a play I never wrote, although Freud survived one tortuous, ambling draft to reappear on a night train through Europe enduring visitation by figments of his past. That drama also led nowhere, until the great man arrived in his study in Maresfield Gardens, London, took an overdose of morphine and a play, Hysteria, finally got written.
Hysteria was the second of three plays performed at the Royal Court that, I recently realised with a sense of satisfaction tempered by the 20 years it took to get around to it, form a sort of trilogy. Insignificance, way back in the early 1980s, was the first, and Hitchcock Blonde, now heading for the West End, completes it. What link these three works are a fair degree of audacity, wise and witty women in various states of undress and, centrally, the male protagonists: famous, aged, unsurpassed in their fields of expertise, revered, ripe for comic dissection and cultural analysis. This awareness is necessarily retrospective, and it is only recently that I realised why these choices are not arbitrary. Why, in populating drama, I have little choice.
Writing the famous is no mysterious quest. I find it easier, on the whole, than writing those people I invent myself. My skills pertain more to Rory Bremner than Eugene O'Neill. I was not a terribly good actor, and I imagine Bremner would find a straight role quite tough because acting demands not only his precision, his ear and his dexterity, but also an honest portrayal of self . Impersonation comes naturally to me; it is a necessary hiding place from which to assault the subject. My self need not come into it, except (and this is why we began in the lighthouse) subconsciously.
And the famous are undeniably audience-friendly. People like seeing drama about people they've heard of. Famous people provide the writer with a well-lit path towards his subject matter, even if he's not yet aware (and at the beginning I never am) what that subject matter might be. The same route beckons the audience with the intimation of a not entirely unfamiliar journey to a place that may turn out to be, in the scope of its vista, entirely unfamiliar.
The audience arrive with knowledge. The writer has attained, via minimal research, a little more knowledge. The general knowledge can be challenged by this particular knowledge. The assumptions of the audience can be overturned. In Aristotelian terms, we skip the Intro, begin with the Development and pre-auger the Reversal with a dozen little turnarounds, all courtesy of the audience's (pre)conception of the characters. This works because the truth about people is always to be found in paradox. The non- paradoxical character is a cliche.
It is not difficult to understand our need to identify with outstanding historical figures in our attempt to find our way through the cultural mire of human-ness. Out of such endeavour grew the cult of personality. Out of the cult of personality grew the cult of celebrity. Hitchcock celebrated this; his famously dismissive attitude to actors did not prevent him from usurping their most effective tool in the quest for glory. He was a self-publicist par excellence.
So Carl Jung finally gets to be alone with his huge patient. He removes the greatcoat, unpeels the layers, seeks out the scars, mental and physical, the amnesia, the puckered flesh, the stitch marks. Stitch marks? Rendered naked, this patient looks as if he has been in a car crash, his memory obliterated, his body torn to shreds. A literary light bulb begins to glimmer above the head of Carl Jung.
Because Jung fell at the first hurdle of my psycho-therapeutic research, I don't know a great deal about him. I was struck, however, by his concept of the archetype. As I remember it, he proposed that our psychic life embraces a number of fundamental modes of being, each of which can be outwardly expressed by the use of archetypes. Anima, animus and their cohorts surface into consciousness in the form of character. Extrapolate this and we can each find within us the Wise Man, the Fool, the Goddess, the Prince, the Wise Virgin, the Trickster, the Crone, the Whore. Jung proposed the psyche as tantamount to a puppet theatre: our life within us, one huge drama. So these familiar figures, upon whose shoulders rest the whole of literature, storytelling, figurative art and drama, were not created by the artist or the experience of man, but are the very polarities between which stretch the dynamics of our inner lives. We are the tellers of tales, but those who inhabit the tales came first. Our expressions of them are the reflection of all the things we are.
Here, then, is an explanation not only of the source of most art, but also of the urge to the cult of personality. Einstein endures more vividly than his ideas because his status as the Wise Old Man is unassailable. Even (in Insignificance) by Monroe, the perfect anima. Freud also inhabits the aspect of aged wisdom, and struggles bravely against his antagonist in Hysteria, who happily labels herself the denied female element of his psyche. Hitchcock is a slight variation on the theme, having pronounced his own genius and inserted his own image into the Sgt Pepper sleeve of popular cultural icons. But his demons, at least in my iconography, are the same, and his nemesis inevitably younger, prettier and more female than himself.
The gentle genius of this archetypal concept goes further, beginning to explain the power of celebrity and even illuminating the economic absurdities of Hollywood. Bruce Willis is the Knight. Jim Carrey is the Trickster. Monroe the Goddess. Madonna the Whore. The power of celebrity is no accident. The desire to revere these people is a psychological necessity. They are the parts of us we want expressed because we dare not express them, or do not have the equipment to do so. We want these demi-gods to play out the dramas that, on a daily basis, torture us from within.
Even if I failed to notice it for many years, it didn't take much detective work to realise that I am inhabited by a Wise Old Man, who is constantly challenged by a vivacious young female. My male aspirance under the constant siege of my anima. She, sadly, remains a figment, while he becomes ever more tangible. As I grow older I realise that I was always old, and that the youthful spirit in me was always, somehow, female. This would explain much of my work and - you'll have to take it on trust - a great deal about my sex life.
Freud returns. Jung explains his hulking patient's amnesia and body scarring. There is no memory because, after death, there is nothing to remember. The body looks as if it were sewn together because it was sewn together. The patient has stumbled from legend. The patient is Frankenstein's monster.
While wholeheartedly embracing the reality of charisma, of fame as a psychic necessity for the well-being of the not-at-all-famous, I have to observe a worrying sea-change. Having carefully constructed and securely embraced our celebrities, we now tear them down, slag them off, photograph them naked, belittle them, dismiss and disregard them: to attempt to dethrone them with an increasing rapidity. Our urge to deify is now being overtaken by our urge to render human. So voracious is our anti-appetite, we now create celebrities specifically to send them into the jungle and make them cry. Or we confer arbitrary celebrity on a dozen all-too-ordinary people, lock them in a house, throw the domestic trials of Hercules at them, then watch to see if they live up to our expectations. Which, of course, they cannot. (I've nothing against Big Brother, having surrendered to the fact that it does everything plays are meant to do, and somewhat better than most modern drama. Discuss.) We have taken a peculiarly diminishing step; we revel in the un-extraordinary. We have been convinced that the grand drama ought not be played out beyond the confines of the tawdry action movie, and that our personal dilemmas are better reflected in the throwaway culture of reality TV than the well-made (whatever that means) play.
The monster is being torn apart by the villagers.
I never wrote a play about Jung. The author chased the phantom Freud into another drama. One day I had a thought about Hitchcock. I began to watch the films again and was only vaguely inspired. I began to watch the way he watched women, and became increasingly inspired. But no plot was forthcoming, so research was relegated to the sporadic. I would occasionally read a book about Hitch, and inevitably found the men who wrote the books quite irritating, quite interesting, quite fascinating... until suddenly there was, quite possibly, a plot. A small illumination on the path towards Hitchcock Blonde.
What happened in 1959, during the shooting of Psycho, leads us with a gothic inevitability to the darker corners of the sound stage. So you can imagine my consternation to discover along the way that one of the archetypes had found me out, disguised herself and kept doing things I didn't expect her to do, as if challenging her own reality. Equally, imagine my delight once the work (which has to be executed in a state of blithe unawareness akin to total blindness) was done, to find the play inhabited not only by a clever, sad old man and a bright, ethereal young woman, but also by their counterparts, living more prosaic lives, disarmingly close to a life I might have lived.
The creature lives, and is becoming strangely human.
Who, then, is Hitchcock in my personal mythology? This corpulent grim reaper who took a lifetime's revenge on his own female figments? A symbol of artistic achievement or a figure of fun? Everything I dreamed of being, or everything I feared I might become? Some parts of us, mercifully perhaps, defy self-definition.
· Hitchcock Blonde previews at the Lyric Shaftesbury, London W1, from Monday. Box office: 0870 890 1107.