Milton Shulman

But you ended up as Major Shulman and you ended up working directly to the War Cabinet, didn't you? What was your job?

I was in a thing called MI14B. Everybody knows what MI5 is, MI6, but very few people have ever heard of MI14B. And MI14B was the department dealing with what is known as German Order of Battle. And my job was to read all the intelligence reports that came from Europe mostly. Prisoner of war statements, pigeons. Pigeons used to be sent over to Dieppe or places like that with little questionnaires on their feet and people would answer them, send us what Germans had come into that area. From that we'd put the order of battle map which we were going to meet on D-Day, sixty-two divisions, and we had to place armoured infantry divisions on that map. And that's what I was doing until about two months before D-Day when I was then transferred to the Canadian Army to become their expert on German intelligence. And the result of this was that I arrived on D two in Normandy and was there till the end of the war in Holland.

Did they remain fanatical or were they immediately disillusioned after they lost the war?

Well, there were a fantastic variety of people from von Rundstedt, who was head of the German armed forces in the West, to a man like Kurt Meyer, who was head of the Hitler Youth Panzer Division, who was a total fanatic. Rundstedt said the only authority I had was to change the guard in front of my gate, because Hitler was giving me orders all the time, and he blamed the entire loss of the war at that stage to Hitler, you see. Whereas a man like Kurt Meyer said to me, If you want to see how Germans can fight, because the Japanese were still in the war, he said, I will lead a German SS division against the Japanese and we will show you what we can do. They were still very fanatically pro-Nazi.

But how do you go to a play? Do you define what you're looking for before you go, or do you just go there, sit down and trust to your own good judgment?

Oh, you go and trust your own good judgment. Most of the time you haven't the faintest idea what you're going to see. When you go see something like the birthday party by Pinter or Waiting for Gotto or things of that kind, for which we've all been condemned because we didn't understand and we didn't like and everything else. Waiting for Gotto, when we're always being attacked for these ideas my class of critics, because most of us found it totally incomprehensible. Now it's sort of required reading for O levels, you know. I know that Peter Hall, who directed, didn't know a great deal about it. The cast hadn't the faintest idea what they were saying and they'd been working on it for months. So why expect us to sit down ten minutes after a play to dash off onto a telephone and try to say something intelligent about a play like that, I don't know.

What about Look Back in Anger, John Osborne? Surely that's a great play. I mean, that was a kind of pivotal moment.

Look Back is probably one of the most overrated plays of all time, and its whole history is one of hype really. And if it's been called rabbits and bunnies or something of that kind, you never heard of it again. And none of the people who are supposed to have been the people inspired by Look Back in Anger uh Wesker, Pinta, Stoppard, all those bit none of them were even had were remotely influenced by Look Back in Anger.