CP Taylor's unique contribution to British theatre
Cecil Taylor died in 1981 at the age of 52 leaving, in the words of his son Avram: "Two wives, four children, two houses, over 70 plays, a guitar, a piano and his personal library." Aside from being the only playwright of his generation to be known by his initials, CP, rather than his given name - a phenomenon that Avram cannot explain - he also wrote Good, arguably the definitive piece written about the Holocaust in the English-speaking theatre.
The subject embraced many of the enduring preoccupations of a Glaswegian Jewish Marxist with an intellect honed when the Clyde was at its reddest. Produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1981 and subsequently seen all over the world, Good is a vivid and complex examination of Brecht's dictum that for evil to prosper, good men must do nothing. The central character, Halder, is a professor of literature: a good, liberal-minded, music-loving man who step by carefully rationalised step ends up embracing the final solution. The play opens with a popular song of the 1930s, I'm Always Chasing Rainbows, stolen, as Halder swiftly reminds us, from Chopin. The message is clear: if art and music are corrupted, the rest must follow.
The problem with creating a classic is that the rest of a considerable life's work tends to be overlooked, including the unique circumstances that made it. Taylor left school at 14, irked, among other things, by the necessity of wearing a tie. Sartorial elegance never stood high on his list of priorities. He worked as an electrician and television engineer and moved to Newcastle in 1955 as a travelling salesman.
From the 1960s onwards he was to become a seminal figure in the cultural renaissance of the north-east, alongside the novelist Sid Chaplin, poets such as Basil Bunting and Tom Pickard, and even local government - the Northern Arts Association, brainchild of the flawed leader T Dan Smith, was the first of its kind anywhere in the land.
In 1962, Taylor's play AA Went Tae Blaydon Races, opened the new Flora Robson Theatre, later demolished for road improvements that haven't significantly improved the traffic flow. The play was a historical drama about a miners' strike - what else? - and Taylor thought: "The audience that saw a play of mine on Tuesday night would rise up en masse on Wednesday morning and set up the workers' state." Like many before and since, he later scaled down his ambition to communicating, "my narrow, odd vision of the world as I see it at the time of writing ... always in the hope that my audience might feel a bit less on their own in this big world, as I do when I read a real book or see a real play".
During the 1960s and 1970s he worked tirelessly in the north-east as what can only be described as a community playwright: with kids in schools and youth theatres, students, people with learning disabilities and as a mentor of would-be writers. The playwright Tom Hadaway was working on the North Shields fish quay when they first met. He recalls: "As someone who had done nothing more pretentious than the gutting of fish, I stood in awe of him. But his intellect was never a barrier. 'Ye dinna take the skin off haddock, di ye, Tommy? The flavour's unner the skin in the fat. Only need a stiff brush tae get the scales off.' How did he know that? Unless he knew everything? He was just a natural working-class thinker, following the common stock of knowledge. Essentially a simple, uncluttered man, with a great love of nature."
When Hadaway's first play was produced at the People's Theatre in Newcastle, a local critic wrote that he was "attempting to paint with oil when he has not yet mastered crayon". Taylor was quick to support the fledgling dramatist.
"He's telled ye the truth, Tommy. An' any man prepared ti tell ye truth is doing ye a gud turn. All ye hev ti do is survive it."
"But what if I don't survive it?"
"Then maybe he's done the rest of us a gud turn."
They laughed, Tom carried on writing and has been painting in oils to this day.
The love of music is crucial. Taylor sang constantly, and played the piano and guitar, though apparently with more enthusiasm than artistry. Play titles such as A Nightingale Sang and Bring Me Sunshine, Bring Me Smiles tell their own story. It can only have been the musical ear that enabled Taylor to write in countless distinctive voices: the more-or-less standard cadences of the RSC plays; the totally unique Glaswegian/Jewish of the blood line, which reached early fruition in his 1966 play, Bread and Butter; and the notoriously tricky accents of the north-east, where speech patterns change almost street by street. He took them all on and they still remained unmistakeably Taylor.
Bread and Butter was first seen at the Jeannette Cochrane Theatre in London, having been turned down by the Citizens' Theatre in Glasgow. It tells the tale of two Jewish couples living in the Gorbals between the years 1931 and 1965, with all the personal and political dimensions those dates imply. It's funny and contradictory, joyous and bleak, and, like all Taylor's work, prodigiously generous with its humanity.
The generosity informed his life as well as his work: the two were indivisible. Max Roberts, now artistic director of Newcastle's Live Theatre, recalls his student days in the 1970s when Taylor involved himself in a series of projects inspired by the dramatic changes taking place in local communities. A characteristic adventure was The Killingworth Play. Killingworth is a satellite town north of Newcastle created in part to accommodate people moved from slum clearance projects in Byker, at a time when government at all levels still used words such as "slum" and "clearance".
Cecil talked to children in the schools and discovered one of the side-effects of the move was that pets weren't allowed in council property and so their dogs and cats wouldn't be allowed to move to Killingworth. This became the story of the play, later produced by the students. He wrote a series of such pieces: The Spittal Tongues Play, The Hoppings Play and Operation Elvis, which saw an early stage appearance by the young Tim Healy.
Live Theatre was formed in 1973 with the aim of providing "theatre for working-class audiences on Tyneside about their own experiences and performed by working-class actors". Making due allowances for the high-mindedness that generally lurks around artistic manifestoes, for the past 30 years it has delivered a great deal more than its political equivalents. Under successive directors Paul Chamberlain, Teddy Kiendl and Max Roberts, an extraordinary series of playwrights have emerged and prospered: Tom Hadaway, Leonard Barrass, Phil Woods, Lee Hall, Peter Straughan, Sean O'Brien, Michael Chaplin and Julia Darling, among others, with the next generation galloping up on the rails.
None of this would have happened without Cecil Taylor as founding father and inspiration and his no-frills style of narrative, with songs and direct address to the audience, has informed much of the Live Theatre tradition. His contribution is all the more remarkable because he was juggling parallel careers in radio, television and in the more mainstream areas of theatre, notably with the RSC and the Traverse in Edinburgh, where he was a de facto resident playwright.
The common factor in all the work is the simplicity that underpins true sophistication. In his later years he lived contentedly in the village of Longhorsley in Northumberland, where he worked in a shed in his back garden. When a television documentary was made about him the interviewer sat alongside him but the cameraman had to film them through the window. He saw things truly and clearly. His dedication to the published version of Good reads: "In memory of my father, Max George Taylor, a refugee from antisemitism in Czarist Russia."
He was always more interested in his characters than he was in himself, whether it was a kid in Byker with an Elvis obsession, Morris and Sharon growing up in the Gorbals or Professor Halder, discovering that in Nazi Germany liberalism is not enough. His enduring passion was for the audience. After all, the characters in a play are simply those members of the audience the playwright has chosen to write about.
Here he is, quoted once more by Tom Hadaway: "Thor all oot there. Millions o' brain cells. Millions o' them. Aal workin' fer ye. No bein' carried along. But racin' ahead. C'mon! Hurry up! We got that! Catch us up! Gi' them credit. They're on yor side. Don' treat them like they're thick."
We need Cecil Taylor. He's our bread and butter.
· Bread and Butter opens at the Tricycle Theatre, London NW6, on November 9.