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The Year of the Jouncer
By Simon Gray
Granta £14.99
282 pages
Dateline: 20th February, 2006
Simon Gray's follow up to The Smoking Diaries
offers more of the same - witty stream of consciousness diaries and memoirs
bouncing around between his early life, sixty or more years ago and the
current day.
It was as a baby that he acquired the description of Jouncer. While
most babies are happy to lie or sleep in prams, the future playwright
very literally perambulating under his own steam, much to the distress
of his mother.
In addition to plumbing the backwaters of a writer's life, this book
also has a considerable amount about his experiences in getting recent
work produced. His tale of The
Holy Terror, a failed reworking of his early play Melon,
starring Sir Simon Callow, is touching, as the playwright watches writing
that he knew to be disastrous proving him right.
The strangest part of this story is that for no explicable reason,
the wrong play actually opened in Brighton, using an early version of
the script that was six or seven drafts away from the finished product.
After a start like that, it would have taken a lot to rescue what was
anyway generally regarded as a mediocre play.
Much more successful was The
Old Masters, a play about art and ageing, which eventually made
it to the Comedy Theatre with Peter Bowles and Edward Fox playing Joseph
Duveen and Bernard Berenson respectively.
In this case, it was greatly gratifying for the playwright to know
that if his first choice as director, Sir Peter Hall was unavailable,
then his great friend Harold Pinter would step in, which actually happened.
Even better was the boost that this gave to Pinter, whose life was in
need of some purpose following his diagnosis with cancer and lengthy
treatment.
The result was a hit that ran for a respectable period of time, despite
the fears of its author. Unexpectedly, a man who seems to take life
in his stride has a pathological fear that every play of his is doomed
to failure.
Luckily, for his readers, they are entertained by a series of asides
as he denies himself the pleasure that he should be taking from a play
favoured by both critics and audiences.
Gray philosophises about life, the movies and homosexuality during
this interlude but finally persuading himself that The Old Masters
really was as good as he had hoped that it would be.
The other focal point of The Year of the Jouncer is perhaps Gray's
most constant collaborator, Sir Alan Bates. The friendship between the
two went far beyond a professional level and the eulogy that this book
offers is deeply moving.
On a happier note, he was clearly thrilled to bits to receive a letter
from Downing Street informing him that the Queen was proposing to invest
her most gracious servant with a something BE.
The pleasure of these books is not only the opportunity to see a man
of the theatre in action. Pleasingly, the writer's love of words constantly
oozes through the mix of gossip, family history, self-analysis and character
study.
During the year, Alan Yentob commissioned a TV documentary based on
The Smoking Diaries and unwittingly drew a perfect summation
of the nature of these writings from their author.
In describing what Yentob achieved, Gray refers to the producer as
having a "rather bloodhoundy or beagly manner, tracking a scent
of a thought or an argument even if it looped in haphazard circles and
brought us back to the side of where we began". This may well fit
Yentob but also presents a perfect description of what Simon Gray does
so well in this book and its predecessor.
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