Imagine that a theatre near you announced a repertoire featuring plays by Edward Albee, Edward Bond, Caryl Churchill, David Hare, Henrik Ibsen, David Mamet and Tom Stoppard. Before you book a season ticket, here’s the catch. The Ibsen is not A Doll’s House or Ghosts but something called Catilina. The Stoppard and Hare are also works you’ve never heard of – Enter a Free Man and How Brophy Made Good – while the Bond is not his celebrated breakthrough, Saved, but its predecessor, The Pope’s Wedding. In fact, among the titles in the brochure, the name of the writer – Mamet, Churchill – is always far more familiar than the play to which it is attached (Duck Variations, Owners). Only one of the offerings in this repertoire – Albee’s The Zoo Story – would be known to most theatregoers.
What links the pieces is that they are all first plays, and my imaginary programming is prompted by a rare run of Peter Shaffer’s 1958 debut, Five Finger Exercise, at the enterprising off-West End theatre Print Room at the Coronet. The play had sharply divergent reviews, from two stars out of five from my colleague, Lyn Gardner, to double that amount from Fiona Mountford in the Evening Standard. Michael Billington, reviewing a Salisbury Playhouse version in 2002, split the difference with three asterisks.
There is a fascination in seeing Shaffer working within the expectations of the commercial West End – Five Finger Exercise is a drawing-room tragi-comedy, unfolding social and sexual tensions during a Suffolk family weekend. This was before the subsidised budgets and bolder remit of the National Theatre unleashed his sub-operatic epics of gestural drama: The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1964), Equus (1973) and Amadeus (1979). Within Five Finger Exercise, there are intriguing hints – in allusions to Greek tragedy, and musical and historical anecdotes – of the grander direction in which the playwright’s imagination was chafing to go.
A problem with first plays, though, is that there is frequently a difference between the chronological and properly creative beginnings of an artist’s career. David Bowie is a case in point. Does his solo career date from Do Anything You Say in 1966, The Laughing Gnome in 1967, or Space Oddity in 1969? The first single is forgotten and the second a novelty that reveals talent but not ultimate intention, while the third established a literary and musical sensibility that would remain recognisable in his work until the end.
The Bowie categories are helpful in adjudicating between dramatic debuts. Unknown singles, akin to Do Anything You Say, would include Stoppard’s Enter a Free Man, a 1968 stage adaptation of an earlier script, and A Walk on the Water, which was the first full-length play he wrote, although the second to be performed, after Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Stoppard’s Enter a Free Man, a comedy about a saloon bar dreamer, is what the music business calls a deleted title, as is Hare’s How Brophy Made Good, a 1969 script, written quickly for Portable Theatre, but so efficiently forgotten that Hare bibliographies tend to give Slag (1970) as his writing debut. In both cases, the writers feel that those dramas were a false start.
Among “laughing gnome” plays, suggesting ability but not yet serious achievement, are Bond’s The Pope’s Wedding (1962), which shows an interest in disaffected youth that was followed up three years later in his notorious reputation-making play Saved, but now seems, with its tense family dynamics and cricketing metaphors, heavily influenced by Harold Pinter, the fashionable young dramatist of that era. Five Finger Exercise would also fit in this category, frequently feeling as if Shaffer, admiring the plays of Arthur Miller but having recently seen John Osborne’s socially groundbreaking Look Back in Anger, was trying to synthesise these impressions in a British domestic drama.
Evidence of mentors is almost inevitable in artistic beginnings – Shaffer now seems to have been discovering the sort of play he didn’t want to write – which makes all the more remarkable early work that, as with Space Oddity, contains unperfected but thrilling hints of where the talent is heading.
Churchill’s Owners (1972) takes an issue of contemporary concern (the concept of possession, relating to both property and sexual politics) and explores it in scenes that – as has become Churchill’s signature – do not have the shape and rhythms of traditional drama. Two decades later, reviewing a 1993 New York production, the fine critic Mel Gussow noted this prophetic element of Churchill’s junior work.
Extraordinarily, Edward Albee, coming before the critics for the first time in 1958, seems to have been born fully clothed as the dramatist he wanted to be and would go on being. The chats between Peter and Jerry in The Zoo Story establish from the outset the battles of language and unreliable biography, in an atmosphere of withheld menace, that would drive the writer’s major later plays: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, A Delicate Balance and The Goat.
It was presumably in full knowledge of The Zoo Story that, two decades later, David Mamet wrote a first professionally staged play that also consisted of a conversation between two men on a bench. Duck Variations is also a fine example of where that writer’s skills and interests would lie later in his career: the dialogue contains in prototype the heightened-naturalistic vernacular – repetitions, hesitations and digressions – that became his trademark.
Similarly, although Catilina has probably disappeared for a reason, Ibsen scholars have found there to be prototypes of characters and themes later perfected in mature plays such as Hedda Gabler, John Gabriel Borkman and The Master Builder, currently at the Old Vic in a new version by David Hare.
Last year, Hare adapted three early texts by the Norwegian’s great Russian contemporary, under the umbrella title Young Chekhov, and it would be intriguing to set the dramatist to work on a Young Ibsen trilogy, perhaps comprising Catilina, The Burial Mound and St John’s Eve – although academic consensus suggests that the material would not prove as fruitful, largely because Ibsen had a much longer and more experimental apprenticeship than Chekhov.
Alternatively, that repertory season of first plays by major writers might be worth exploring, although perhaps, initially, as a series of readings or radio productions, and, even in those circumstances, writers might be reluctant to release the rights. But, whether they show the moment where a writer took a diversion into different territory (as with Five Finger Exercise or Enter a Free Man) or a confident conquering of chosen territory (Owners, Duck Variations, The Zoo Story), first plays can have the illuminating fascination of the childhood chapters in a biography.
