Article: My grandfather Kenneth Horne, playwright

At Christmas I slept on a camp-bed in my grandfather’s study at the top of the house, a little garret with its own winding staircase. I wore my bright red dressing-gown and woke to find strings of gob-stoppers in my Christmas stocking. The room was full of dark wood and leather and publicity photos of leading ladies, and had a spooky mask from Malaysia on the wall. It was intricately carved in a hardwood, an empire trinket from a jazz-age interior. Grandad’s desk was like the Police Chief’s in a film noir, chunky and macho, and it was here that he wrote his twenty plays, thirteen of which made it to the West End between 1934 and 1965. I inherited the desk, which I have kept as a talisman.

I only gradually became aware that Grandad was a playwright. His last West End play, A Public Mischief, was adapted for television in the late sixties: I dimly remember mini-skirts flitting across a small black-and-white set. His swansong, The Coming Out Party, played in Bromley in 1970, the year my sister died; I was taken to see it, aged nine. We didn’t have the best seats in the house (why not?) but I remember a big, bright set, a story about ambiguity and embarrassment, and a wonderful performance from the actress who later played the grumpy guest in Fawlty Towers who complains about the view.

At the age of fifteen, when my grandfather was in the last year of his life, I read as many of his plays as I could lay my hands on, and then, inspired, wrote my first, a one-act comedy-thriller set in 1939 called Drawing-Room Tragedy. My art-teacher, a delightful old aesthete who was on a mission to bring refinement into our souls, lent me his furniture for my deco set in the school’s theatre workshop. This was the mid-seventies, the era of Biba’s deco folly in Kensington High Street, when Anthony Price was dressing Bryan Ferry like the Great Gatsby: I was right in tune with fashion. But it was all about Grandad really. If he had been there he would have seen a bunch of schoolboys paying him and his world slavish tribute. Sadly, cancer carried him off before the curtain rose.

My grandfather was school-of-Moliere, a pleaser, an artist of the depression and the war years whose brief was to make an audience feel safe and loved. You could put on your nicest clothes, turn up at the theatre and know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you were going to have good time.

The only advice he ever gave me was, “Comedy must be played straight.” This was also the basis of his writing. He wrote straight. The comedy is understated, camouflaged, the madness disguised. He lived in an age when things didn’t have to be gut-wrenchingly hilarious to be considered worthy of attention. As a result, his plays have room to breathe. Because they are not constantly falling over themselves to produce the next huge laugh, there is time for storytelling.

If there is a theme running through them, it is the clash between irksome moral obligation and anarchic, frisky instinct, which is also the clash between nineteenth- and twentieth-century values. Coward is credited with having blown the formal speech-rhythms of traditional English comedy out of the water with the flashy interchanges of his brats and flappers. Kenneth Horne also played his part in this dialogue revolution, although he lacked the benefit of Coward’s thoughtlessness. Horne’s characters teeter on the brink of the outrageous, the perverse and the anarchic, but always shy away from the precipice and return to the fold.

The best plays are the ones in which this conflict is most vividly dramatised. In The Good Young Man (1940), a shabby family living in a cramped basement flat hear that they are to be visited by a distant cousin, a missionary’s son brought up in Papua New Guinea, coming to England in search of a wife. Nothing, on the face of it, could be more tiresome; but the cousin turns out to be a dreamboat, Tarzan in a lounge-suit, and the case is instantaneously altered. The family is galvanised into self-reinvention, seduced by muscles and a smile. In Love In A Mist (1941), a secretary who embarks on a dirty week-end with her boss’ son gets cold feet when they arrive, fog-stranded, at a gothic B&B on Exmoor; she appeals to a newly-wed bride to help her escape the clutches of her date. This is the one where Grandad really got it right. Love is a mist, an attempt to communicate with the person you’re in love with, in the face of differing expectations and needs and points of reference. Nihilism lurks in the hellish Groundhog Day circularity of the plot, but is kept safely at bay, like a monster in a cage for us to tease. When the fog finally clears, it is revealed that there is a perfectly nice hotel just across the road, along with a petrol station and everything needed for escape. Salvation, sanctuary – it would all be there for us if only we could de-mist our perception.

Coward felt that if the Germans had invaded England, the intellectuals would have been the first to collaborate, and my grandfather shared this deep mid-century mistrust of the intellectual. He disliked education and was less than supportive of his children’s academic aspirations. Given this, the painstaking craftsmanship of his writing is all the more remarkable, although a clue may lie in the fact that he had probably read and seen a lot of Shaw, with whom he shared a manager, Roy Limbert. Yet anti-intellectualism was to prove his Achilles heel. When Kenneth Tynan launched his attack on the well-made play in the fifties, my grandfather didn’t know what had hit him. Tynan’s broadside seemed liked malice, when in fact it was more of a necessary corrective: Coward and his contemporaries had gotten stale, and the pleasures of drawing-room banter had been exhausted. Grandad remained hurt to the end of his life, and his depressive side, which had once been held in balance with the manic upswing that gave us the comedies, took over. The changes of the times were taking place in the realm of ideas; it was, therefore, a choice between intellectual engagement and artistic death. My grandfather was unable to engage, and his last plays lack brio. There is a misconception that Kenneth Horne wrote bedroom farces; he didn’t, but a play such as Wolf’s Clothing (1958) paved the way for certain tawdry farces of later decades.

My grandfather was a magician who defied the laws of misery and limitation, pulling an endless succession of rabbits out of his hat, all the way through the depression and the war and into the drab, traumatic fifties. Unlike Coward he never branded himself. He was incapable of giving interviews, let alone swishing around onstage with a cocktail and a cigarette-holder. And so, in a century that demanded iconic visual presences, he faded away. It is unfortunate that he shared a name with the radio star whose Around the Horne has eclipsed Grandad’s fame - largely due to the participation of Kenneth Williams. But in theatrical circles, the playwright Kenneth Horne is still very much remembered, and amateurs around the Anglophone world still put on his plays.

Ironically, my own identity as a gay man meant that I would ultimately be more drawn to Coward, and this made me, in my own mind at least, both keeper of the family flame and traitor to it. My belief is that an artist has no choice as to his subject matter, because art is a dialogue between the unconscious and the world. My stories have always had a nervous preoccupation with sex and relationship, a scratching of an erotic itch which is not to everyone’s taste. I have been told off by both family members and contemporaries.

I have no idea what my grandfather would think of me if he knew me now. Would he be proud, or would he think my work needlessly rude? I have his desk and I think of him frequently, although I feel closer to Coward and Orton. What I can say is that my connection with him gave a certain twist to the course of my development as a writer. When I was growing up, nothing could have been less fashionable than 1930s drawing-room comedy, yet I gorged myself on it. It was the equivalent of a visual artist getting a thorough grounding in anatomy. There is a large part of me that is mad and confused and embattled and ambivalent and an outsider, but there is also, deep down, a part of me that knows that if you sweep across the stage, light a cigarette and say a certain kind of line in a certain kind of way, an audience will laugh.

Gay people do not have an easy relationship with society. Theatre and film, moreover, are two of the more whorish branches of the arts, arenas in which the artist must supply pleasure or go under. Why is it, then, that gay men make good playwrights? My suspicion is that it has everything to do with an itchy kind of relationship with family. I have had an itchy relationship not just with family but with a bona fide playwright, and that has enabled me to evolve my own style. I have, yes indeed, been told off by a certain very eminent director for writing in a retro style - which surely cannot be a bad thing. At least I have style.

Phil Setren and I have recently been wondering about whether it would wash to put on one of Grandad’s plays alongside one of my own, and this has prompted me to review Grandad’s oeuvre once more. One rather surprising thought has occurred: his best characters are the young women, usually virgins, who are teetering on the brink of sexual experience, and the nicest scenes are the ones in which these innocents offer themselves up, with some degree of apprehension, for ravishment. This, I think, locates Grandad’s emotional centre of gravity, and reminds us why there was all the difference in the world between him and Coward. (Coward’s characters have had so much sex they are positively sick of it).

But there’s more to it than that. Why didn’t Grandad encourage my mother to act? She wanted to. Was it because she was his only daughter, and would have probably ended up playing precisely those frisky virgin roles that he himself was writing? And if my mother’s acting ambitions were frustrated, where does that leave me? They say you are doomed to live out your parents’ unfulfilled desires.

COPYRIGHT ROBERT FARRAR 2009

Todd Boyce and Mari-Claire Turley in my play Complex, directed by Phil Setren. The play, written in a Coward/Horne mode, is about a young woman whose sexuality manifests in a disturbing way. (photo by Sean Patterson)