Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Barrister and writer, best known for his comic novel 'Sherade' and for writing plays.
On the island
Eight records
The keepsakes
The book
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:12What was your first ambition as a boy?
Well, I wanted to be a star of musical comedy. I wanted to be a kind of Noah Card and sit down at a big white piano and play sophisticated songs. But as I couldn't sing a note at all … [I] couldn't play the piano … [but] that didn't deter me in my childhood when I entertained my parents with the snatches of Ginger Rogers and Fred Arstaire are numbers, but it must have been agony for all concerned.
Presenter asks
4:23Those two short plays with which you started your dramatic career must have been real money spinners, John. How many countries has 'The Dock Brief' been played in now?
Well, I think it's been played in every country, um, really in the in the Communist world and in the allegedly free world. I heard last that it was done by two murderers real murderers in Saint Quentin prison, which I was quite pleased by. Um, but it is the sort of play which has a long life. I think because it's a very cheap play to put on, only two characters in one set.
Presenter asks
5:08How did you manage to get any work writing down at all [with six children and stepchildren about the house]?
Well, it was quite extraordinary because Penelope also wrote a lot at that time. She wrote novels and a lot of short stories. I think the kind of desperation is a very good atmosphere for writers to live in. I mean we really needed to pay the grocer and also I think living with young children gives you a kind of substance and basis to your life which is very good for a writer.
William Shakespeare
The luxury
Not recorded.
Presenter asks
5:38Are you methodical? Do you work certain hours every day?
Well, when I'm working I'm very hysterical, and I will get up very, very early, say four o'clock in the morning … And that's when I work, when everybody else is asleep.
Presenter asks
8:23Most modern playwrights with any serious intent are given labels by the critics. What label have you been given?
Oh, well, all sorts of labels. I think they're totally false and purely the inventions of critics. … I think the great fallacy is that there are a large selection of sort of plays that people can choose to write, so that I could set to sit down tomorrow and write a kind of Brechtian social parable … I can only write as a result of my childhood and the sort of person I am, and the things that are important to me which are very few, and I think you have no choice.
Presenter asks
10:04As a writer, is there any one subject that you want to write about?
Well, I very much want to write a book, a non fiction book, about my father and about my childhood, because that curious life I was brought up in just before the war, of my father who was not only in solitary and that he was in the middle classes, but solitary because he was blind and which really has now quite ended. I feel like in a way a kind of last relic of it, but perhaps in a way a bridge between it and what is going on now, and I'd like to examine that.
“I used to go down to the East End and hang about in the free legal aid bureaus in the hope that a murderer dripping with blood would come running off the street and ask me to defend him. But no murderers ever came, mainly puzzled Greek ladies who didn't know how to cope with the rent acts came and people who wished to get rid of their elderly wives and I was able to help them and it it did accumulate.”
“I think the kind of desperation is a very good atmosphere for writers to live in.”
“I think there's a marvellous feeling of disaster [about first nights]. It's like a road accident or an execution or evolution. Anything can happen.”
“I can only write as a result of my childhood and the sort of person I am, and the things that are important to me which are very few, and I think you have no choice.”
“I think it's been very important to me as a writer to have another world to live in.”