Lindsay Anderson

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Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a download from the Desert Island Discs archive.

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This edition may be slightly different from what was actually broadcast, but it is the only version we have. It comes from the British Library's radio collection.

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The recording didn't contain the guests' eight music choices, so we've rebuilt the original show by using discs from the B B C Gramophone library. For Wright's reasons we've had to shorten the music.

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Full details can be found on the Castaways page on the Desert Island Disc's website.

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The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen eighty.

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And the presenter was Roy Plumley.

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Our castaway this week is the theatre and film director Lindsay Anderson.

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How much does music mean in your life?

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Well it means quite a lot, though.

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I was thinking about this, and strangely enough, I don't

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listen to as much music as I'd like or as I ought. I think I've always enjoyed making music.

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Though I've never really played an instrument, just toyed with the piano, I have.

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I sung a bit in various choirs when that was easy and I like singing. Have you ever been tempted to tackle a musical play or film? Well, I once did a play, which could be called a play with music. It was a play called The Lily White Boys, which we did at the court, which was a kind of satirical musical early play with the first time I worked with Albert Finney, in fact. And yes, I enjoyed doing that. You enjoy getting the incidental music together and plotting that? Very much. And I find the music, for instance, in both films and plays to me is very important and an affair of.

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Real calculation and

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That's something I enjoy doing. Do you play records a lot?

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A fair amount.

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To narrow them all down to a total of eight isn't generally thought to be easy. No, it's terribly difficult. What's the first one you have there? The first one I thought would be good because it would evoke certain things in my past or in my blood, which is mostly Scottish.

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Although I've never been exactly a Scots Scot.

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But my father was all Scottish and my mother was half Scottish, and as a result I've never felt entirely English.

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And uh I also thought that it would be valuable to have something stirring and emotive to march up and down the beach with, because obviously I would have to work hard at keeping fit, and I can't think of anything better than a bagpipe band and Scotland the Brave.

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Scotland the Brave, the Gordon Highlanders Military Band and Pipe and Drum Corps. You weren't born in Scotland, of course. No, I was born in India. My father was in the British Army in India. He was, in fact, a major general? Well, I think he ended up as being a major general. I suppose he was a lieutenant when I was born. My parents separated. They were divorced when I was about ten. My stepfather, though, was also a military man from the Royal Engineers. And so that side of life has always been rather strong in my background. How old were you when you left India? I was only about two, but the connection has always been there. I was in India during the war, in the army, in Delhi, and I've been back several times. And I think when you've been a member of a

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I was in

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What we used to call an Anglo-Indian family in those days, somehow India is very present in the family tradition.

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So you were in prep school in England, then Cheltenham College. What were you best at at school?

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Oh, well, I was a a classic. Academically I was rather proud of doing Greek and Latin and I went up to Oxford. I had a year in Oxford before I went into the army during the war, and I went up actually on classics. Was your army career interesting?

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Not frightfully. I ended up attached to the intelligence and we were engaged in the deciphering of codes, which sounds very interesting, except that all that is related to mathematics and I'm quite hopeless at it. I was never quite sure how I got into it and I can't remember much about it. How long were you away from Oxford? Well, I think about three and a half years. It's a long time. It is. When I went back to Oxford, I couldn't face going back to Greek and Latin. I didn't read greats. I took the easy way out and read English. Now, your second record refers to your wartime period. Yes, it refers to India. In Delhi, we were very fortunate. There was a very nice chap, a brother officer, on the station in Delhi, a Yorkshireman, George Wood, and he ran a male voice choir.

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Yes, it it

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And I've always enjoyed singing, I enjoyed being in the choir at school. And one of the pieces that I remember most clearly was.

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A male voice arrangement of bushes and briars.

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And we used to sing this on the radio sometimes, and uh it evoked, of course, very strongly the

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English background, the English tradition, and I've always thought a very beautiful piece of music.

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What's the

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And so dry

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Cause I lately told my

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For the health Lords.

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And what I want to ski to

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My own true love, the voice it always.

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An Essex folk song, Bushes and Briars, arranged by Vaughan Williams and sung by the Baccholian singers of London. Now, did you play a major part in university theatre life? Not major. I didn't like university theatre very much at Oxford, although I was always tremendously keen on theatre, on acting, and at one time absolutely scandalized my mother by announcing I was going to be an actor. Fortunately, the war intervened. But the theatre life at Oxford after the war became very competitive.

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And I didn't like that very much. It wasn't so enjoyable. But I was always tremendously keen on theatre and on cinema. I used to go with my grandmother to the cinema.

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In one production in Oxford, you were directed by Ken Tynan. What was that? That's true. I appeared in his production of Hamlet, in which Hamlet was played by Sir Peter Parker, but he wasn't Sir Peter Parker then, or head of British Railways, but he was a fine Hamlet, and I played an antique Horatio, aged up to about 65, and having to speak with a very heavy German accent, which was Ken's idea of the party. It was one of those undergraduate productions that revelled in eccentricity. This was the quarter, we used a very corrupt text. Sir Peter talked about that quite recently when he was Arthur's programme. I'm glad he remembers it as well as I do.

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That is what the

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Uh we used a very

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Ready?

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Let's have your next record, because I believe that's associated with your theatrical ambitions. Well, I think that the Tchaikovsky Serenade for Strings, which to me evokes most strongly really the the New York City ballet and and Balanchin's serenade when they came to London in the early 50s and seems to me an essentially and splendidly theatrical piece of music.

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The opening of the Tchaikovsky Serenade for Strings of the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir John Barbie Raleigh. Now, even more important than your theatre work at the university at that time was your work for the Oxford film magazine Sequence. You were a founder of that, weren't you? Nearly. The Oxford University Film Society existed when I got back from the war, and they'd actually produced the first issue of a magazine they called Sequence. I got onto the editorial board, and we somewhat expanded and somewhat transformed it. And with a friend there, Peter Erickson, and then in London, a school friend, Gavin Lambert, we turned it into a, you might call national magazine, with one of those magazines that are done in the bedroom, you know, and nobody gets paid anything for writing it. What was the policy of the magazine? Well, it was a time of really rediscovering cinema after war had intervened and there were lots of films you couldn't see and didn't know about. And I think that we were very taken by American cinema as opposed to British cinema, which at that time was, I think, rather overpraised. And one of my great enthusiasms was John Ford, the films of John Ford.

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And uh we wrote about Ford, we wrote about the directors we particularly admired. It was a very combative and enthusiastic uh magazine. How long did it last? It didn't last terrible long. About I should think about three years. Yes. The kind of thing that would be difficult to do now because everything has become so expensive.

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But then we did it on our own money, lost a bit of our own money, a bit of money from friends. An amateur but quite influential venture. By the time it expired, you had already started making documentary films yourself. I had. I was terribly lucky. I met a marvellous friend, Lois Sutcliffe as she was then, who was married to the managing director of a firm in Wakefield, and they wanted a film made. And by some divine intervention, she decided that I would make it well, though I knew absolutely nothing about filmmaking, and she recommended me to her husband, and they took a chance. And I went up to Wakefield and I made a film, which I directed and wrote and edited.

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learned really what film making was. Yes, you made industrial films, government films, advertising films. You you you were feeling your way about the medium. You had an award for one? Yes. Ooh, two, I think. Ooh, I'm so sorry. Well, I made a film with a friend, Guy Brenton, that we made a film about deaf children called Thursday's Children, that was in the early 50s, and that won an Oscar. And then I made a film about Covent Garden Market, and that was made for a movement which some friends, Carol Rice and Tony Richardson, and I founded at the National Film Theatre in the late 50s. And we were really working our way into trying to make feature films. And this was a film about the market at Covent Garden. And working your way in still further, you made some episodes of the television series Robin Hood. Oh, that was very fortunate. That was my first experience of ever working in a studio and working with some rather distinguished actors, in fact. So these were days of hope, not frustration? They were indeed days of hope when there was a tottering establishment which it was fun to attack.

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No, I

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Now before we get to the point where you turn your attention to the theatre for some years, let's have record number four. Yes, well this relates to my enthusiasm for cinema and for John Ford. And unfortunately there haven't been any albums of music from Ford Pictures. I don't know why. Santrecarl. Santrecar, they're so lyrical. But there is a recording of She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, one of my favourite films, and this I think would evoke a multitude of great experiences to me.

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The sound checker.

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Count this.

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There's the yellow villain. She wears it in the winter and the summer, so they say. If you ask her why the decoration, she'll say it's for my lover who is far, far away. Far away, far away.

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He's saying it is not a lover who is far from

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She wore a yellow ribbon.

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The Kingsway Marching Band and Chorus, conducted by Alan Civil.

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Now you didn't turn your attention to the theatre for some years. What was your first production in the professional theatre? I did a Sunday night production at the Royal Court where I was invited chiefly by my friend Tony Richardson and I did a play called The Waiting of Leicester Abbs. This was one of those without decor. Without decor. It was written by a very good novelist, Kathleen Sully. And we did it for one night and it initiated me into professional theatre and from that, I think, about a year later, I got the invitation to do a play called The Long and the Short and the Tall. And these were extraordinarily exciting days in the theatre. Now you were to stay with the Royal Court on and off for about twenty years. Well I suppose I was now I come to think of it. Now The Long and the Short and the Tall, an army play for which you found some young and unknown actors. Well they were. In fact I was asked to do the play with Albert Finney whom I didn't know but Albert after the first day of rehearsals developed appendicitis and we looked around to find another actor and the one we found was

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Without data

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Peter O'Toole and then there was uh Robert Shaw in it. I mean I hesitate to mention the names because I'll leave somebody out and get it.

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A grieved letter. But they were a splendid cast and of course that was the time when there was a tremendous breakthrough of young actors coming in from the working class, actors who did not lose their original accents as actors before had always been required to do at Rada, and who retained the kind of vitality and personality of their backgrounds. And that was very much a part of the theatre in the late 50s and early 60s, together of course with the new writers who were breaking in. It was a tremendously stimulating and lively time. Billy Liar was another of yours. Yes, I did Billy Lyre with Albert about a year or two after The Long and the Short. And that was of course written by Willis Hall, who'd written The Long and the Short Note, with Keith Warthouse, who wrote the book. And that was a commercial play. That's to say, we did that in the West End, not at the Royal Court. But there were a lot of plays around, like Sergeant Musgrave's Dance by John Arden, plays by Christopher Lowe. I really can't remember them offhand, but a tremendous variety of writing. You've had a very rewarding long-term theatre partnership with David Story. What was the first play of his that you did? Well, the first venture, of course, that I did with David wasn't a play, it was a film. And that was This Sporting Life, the film done from his novel. And after I'd worked in the theatre three or four years, there was a breakthrough in the cinema, and young directors started getting a chance of making pictures, whereas before, really, it was impossible to break into the feature industry. And it was Tony Richardson, Carol Rice, with Saturday Night and Sunday morning. And that was when I got my chance with This Sporting Life. And that did begin an association and a friendship of great value and importance in my life. You've done about half a dozen plays with that. I think I have. I think the one I've just done is the seventh, actually. Somebody told me.

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Uh

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Uh

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For some years you had an administrative job at the Royal Court? I think so, sort of. Well, I take... Nobody told you, really, for certain. No, it was more, shall we say, artistic administration. Yes. I would never be any good, unfortunately, at administration in the pure sense. But then, when you left the Royal Court, you had the idea of starting a sort of West End rep company, the same company doing a number of plays. That was a rather difficult project. It was written about in those terms, but really we were quite practical in our approach. We really did two plays in repertory. If it had been possible to go on, we would have, but I don't think it's possible to run an unsubsidized repertory theatre in the West End. We were very fortunate in doing The Sea Gull and in discovering a new play by Ben Travers, The Bed Before Yesterday, to be successful. And I think we did pretty well, really.

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Right, you talked about your first feature film.

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Uh The Sporting Life. Very anti-heroic film, but a very good one, which got you an award at the Cairn Film Festival. Now, despite your excellent notices, you didn't set up another feature film for quite a long time. No, I didn't. I I waited, really. I've always been open to luck, shall I say. And although I made a film which hasn't been seen very much, called The White Bus, it's not a full-length film, about 50 minutes, I went on doing theatre. Then I got a a script written by two young writers about their school days and worked with that writer, David Sherwin, and we we made it into If. A rather strange film about revolutionary schoolboys who massacre the teachers and parents. An allegory? I mean, what was going on in this film? I felt I wasn't understanding it. Oh, dear. I think you should perhaps see it again. Yes, I should. Yes. I think you might find now that it would be clearer than when you first saw it. I think IF was really a very simple, straightforward film, which did combine a kind of realism with what I'd call a kind of poetry, if you like. I think that the kind of violence with which the picture ended did make concrete the fantasies of many schoolboys, as many of them have told me.

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Yeah

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I think that the cinema is most interesting when it's not entirely literal. And although the cinema tends to be mostly naturalistic, I find it most uh stimulating to work in when you can actually use the possibilities of cinema to transcend the naturalistic or literal.

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Nancy.

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I didn't see the next film, Oh Lucky Man, a a very personal film, I believe. I think it was. It was an extraordinary venture that I'm proud of. It was a very ambitious film. It went beyond, if I would say, in its ideas, in its philosophy. It was a mixture of a satirical picture of society in a rather condide type way with a spiritual quest.

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In terms of humour, satire, and the picaresque. So it's a picture that had an enormous spread to it.

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The original version is about two hours and fifty minutes, and was a very big undertaking. I think there's a line from Browning, A man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?

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Well, I little bit think of that in relation to a lucky man.

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Right, we've got to record number five. Well that is from uh O Lucky Man. One of the important things about the picture was the musical content. And there was a score on songs written by Alan Price, I think very brilliantly. And uh I would like to

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Well I'd like to have the whole album with me if I may, but perhaps we might hear one which I particularly like, Poor People, which will remind me of that network of associations.

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Under the stair

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A man's got to make whatever he wants and take it with his own hands.

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Poor people, stay poor people, they never get to see

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Someone's got to win in the human race If it isn't you then it has to be me so s

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Alan Price leading Poor People from O Lucky Man. You've stayed with directing. You've done very little writing and remarkably little acting, although you have done a bit. Well, it's nice of you to say that. I don't regard myself as an actor. I think I can perform a little bit. I think I am, for good or ill, a director. I'm not a creative writer. I've done a bit of critical writing and I'm just finishing a book, actually, which will be published at the end of the year, I think, on John Ford. But I don't regard myself as a creative writer. You've criticised the subsidised theatre fairly heavily in the past. You're now working at the National. Well, obviously it's a pity not to use the facilities, even if you criticise the set-up. Another David story play. A sort of fragment, really. Well, it's of course it's difficult to find the word. It isn't like a three-act plotted play. Uh a fragment.

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I don't know a poem, an elegy, a

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Peace. Early Days with a lovely performance by Sir Ralph Richardson.

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And you've recently done your first television production. Oh, yes. The Old Crowd by Alan Bennett. Is this something that's going to continue? Oh, well, that's that's an embarrassing question. Uh I uh enjoyed doing the piece very much, and uh I think we were all Those of us who made it, we we liked the old crowd, we thought it was terrific, and the degree to which it aroused outrage and venom from the critics really, I think, confirmed us in our feeling that we'd done something rather good.

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You know, television is such a conformist medium. I think this is the great sadness of it. Of course, the potential of television is very great, but the opportunity to do anything really original on television is extremely small. And it is essentially a medium for

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There's a story about you that at the age of nine you wrote on a looking glass the words, I rebel about nothing in particular. Is that true? Well, it was that actually pinned up these words on the notice board at St. Ronan's, my prep school, with a boy called Stead.

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And Stead and I put this up, and it wasn't apropos anything, it was really very odd.

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Uh I think I shouldn't have told anybody that story because um one finds it ceaselessly repeated and, so to speak, pinned on one's back. It would have got around in any case. It probably would. Uh I think that really as society gets more conformist, I think one has a duty to be a sceptical individual, true to oneself, shall I just put it like that. I think to become a professional rebel would be very boring. On the other hand, I do think that um

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Safety and conformism is even more boring.

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Let's have another record. It's time we did. Most of these records I I like very much as music and they are related to my experiences of course and one doesn't have to have any reason of course for wanting the Brandenburg concertos. But the end of the sixth Brandenburg is one that also happily recalls a David Story play life class because we used this at the end of the play through the curtain call and all through the time when the audience left the theatre. So we played the entire movement and I think it has great exhilaration and positiveness and this would do me good.

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The last movement of the sixth Brandenburg Concerto, the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Sir Adrian Bolt. Let's go straight into our next one, number seven.

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Well, there couldn't be, I suppose, a greater contrast in the English hymn with which we follow that's uh the day thou gavest, Lord is ended. And that to me is such

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an emotional and nostalgic and charming piece of music that I just know I would like to have it.

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We

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My praise.

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The Day Thou Gavest Lord is ended sung by the Leeds Parish Church Choir.

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Are you a practical man?

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Could you look after yourself on a desert island? Are you good at building huts and fishing and that sort of thing? No, I don't think I am. Uh but I think I'm perhaps not as bad as I think I am. I think as a as a little boy I did a bit of fishing. I'm

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I had a sh

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Oh, yes, and recently. But I'm not a fisherman, but I think if driven to it, I could surprise myself. Would you try to escape?

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I don't think I would at first, because there'd be so much I would be happy to get away from. But I might be driven to it by boredom, though I'm not confident that I would pull it off. Record No. eight

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Well, I feel that, particularly with a hymn like The Day Thou Gavest, there might be a danger of my sinking into a somewhat sentimental or over nostalgic frame of mind, and I would like to have a song by Brecht.

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who is a writer and theatre director I have enormously admired and probably been.

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to some degree influenced by

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And I'd like to have Brecht himself singing the song of human inadequacy from the Thrapony Opera.

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I think the kind of irony that there is in Brecht, which didn't make him at all a cold kind of man or a cold kind of artist, but which really fuelled his humanism,

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and his passion.

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I think that kind of irony is indispensable, and I think this would prevent me getting too sentimental about the world that I

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was divorced from.

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They are men schlait turtlenecks.

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They're copright in this house.

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Versuches Nur von Diinem Kop Leibs hens eine laus.

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Okay.

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Then slaven is termeschnic laukinum.

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And

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Neil Merck er Aven, Easen Luke.

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Brecht himself singing a song from The Threpanny Opera. If you could take one disc and one disc only, which would it be?

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I think I'd be tempted by Brecht because he's so healthily caustic, but I'd probably settle for Bach. The sixth Brandenburg Concerto.

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Jatter

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And one luxury? Well, the luxury is perhaps a bit practical, but I was thinking what I'd like. I think I'd like a box of, if I might have, of seeds.

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with instructions on the back and a watering can.

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Yes, we'd have to have notice of what sort of seeds you want. They mustn't be too practical. They can be pretty mixed. Yes, yes. I mean, after all, I couldn't tell one seed from another if you showed me the box. I think you can get away with quite a lot there. And one book apart from the Bible and Shakespeare and big encyclopedias.

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They must

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Cosi

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Yes.

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Well, I thought perhaps of a Loeb edition of uh Homer, which has the Greek on one side and the English on the other.

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And it's between that and I would also like to read again very much Les Thibault by Roger Martin Dugas, which is a book that seems completely to have disappeared, an epic book with almost the kind of scope of a a bourgeois word piece.

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Well, I'm afraid you have to make a decision. I'll take Les Thibault. Right. Les Thibault by Roger Martin Dugard. Correct. That shall be your book. And

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Well I'm

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I think as it's you you shall have one film, which we'll rig up for you on a videotape machine. Yes, wa one is almost almost worse than none, but I think it'll have to be.

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Ford, my most constant enthusiasm. And of Ford's pictures, I probably settled for what I would think is his most personal, and that's they were expendable.

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John Ford's, they were expendable. And thank you, Lindsay Anderson, for letting us hear your Desert Island discs. Happy to have.

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Join the ranks. Thank you. Goodbye, everyone.

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You've been listening to a download from the Desert Island Discs archive. For more downloads, please visit the Radio 4 website.