In 1981 Peter Nichols won the London Evening Standard best play of the year award for Passion Play, his ingenious and revelatory account of modern mores. It was the fourth time he had won the award - a record - and his position as one of Britain's leading playwrights was assured. But there was no lachrymose and gracious acceptance speech. Instead, Nichols chose to launch into a splenetic rant about members of the cast whose pay demands had ensured the play's short run at the RSC didn't transfer to a commercial west end theatre. How sick he was of accepting awards for plays that had already closed, he fulminated.
It sounds par for the course for a man who is easy to cast as the embittered lost genius of the London stage. Ever since the early 80s, Nichols has found it increasingly difficult to get his plays staged, and now says he doesn't read the newspapers, "not only because they might say something bad about me, but even worse, they might say something good about someone else". His last work to be seen, Blue Murder, was a play about putting on a play and was itself put on in a space called Quakers Friars above the register office in Bristol. As Nichols put it to a friend, "every year at awards ceremonies it seems that my seat gets nearer to the lavatories".
However, Passion Play is due to be restaged this month. Where Pinter fractured and reversed time in Betrayal, his study of infidelity, Nichols's radical approach to the same subject had already blazed a trail in slowing time down. To communicate to the audience the inner thoughts and motivations of the troubled married couple he used a parallel pair of actors - it was a stunning, and at the time groundbreaking, coup de thétre.
Nichols, who has never been short of friends and admirers in the industry, is hoping the Passion Play revival will spark a reassessment of his work. "He is such a theatre man," says Stephen Sondheim, who has known him for 30 years. "Peter was an actor when he started, as were so many of the best playwrights in history. He really knows the stage."
Michael Frayn is also an admirer. "I have been greatly influenced by his work. One of the wonderful things about him as a writer is that he is very dangerous. He doesn't have any of the techniques of self censorship and self preservation that other writers develop. Sometimes he says terrible things that no one else would say that absolutely strike home to one's heart, and sometimes he says things which are embarrassing. But that is part of being a dangerous writer."
The American theatre producer Hal Prince is equally impressed but thinks that Nichols has not played the game: "Maybe he has not been as pragmatic as he might have been. He is one of the best contemporary playwrights your country has produced. I wish he had previously just swallowed some of the guff and saved his generally accurate opinions for himself. There is a certain lunatic courage in how quick he is to express what he feels, and while Peter never sets out to hurt people's feelings, he has never learned not to say what he thinks."
So what is Nichols's best guess as to why, when he has been more productive than ever, only two new works have been staged in the past 13 years? "I've asked that question in private and in public and if I knew the answer I might be a happier person," he says. In 1993 he published a long poem in the Independent, "The Rime Of The Ancient Dramatist", about him accosting the then director of the National Theatre Richard Eyre and haranguing him about his neglect. "This is the fourth play of mine/ You've found your reasons to decline", etc etc.
"I suppose it just comes down to the fact that they don't like my stuff," he says. "When young playwrights ask for advice I always say 'get a friend at court'. Michael Grandage, who is directing Passion Play, is friendly to my stuff, therefore it goes on. In 1990 Richard Eyre and everyone else loved a play of mine called Euphoria that was due to go on at the National. But as soon as the director, Mike Ockrent, dropped out for a film job, the play was stranded. You have to remember that theatres are run by directors."
This theory of directorial discrimination is given added credence in that critics have been generally enthusiastic about his work. "As Edith Evans said about the Russians when people talked about Stalin's tyranny," explains Nichols, "they've always been very nice to me. But I am less concerned about my critical reputation and more with just getting the plays on. I want to see how they work with an audience."
Just how difficult this simple aim has become is starkly illustrated by Nichols's recent calculation that while 41 of his works including adaptations, films and television have been realised, there are now another 40 that have been rejected. These, all lined up in neat box files in the top floor office he has in his Belsize Park home, have a strange ongoing half life as continuing works in progress. He has turned scripts that were not filmed into novels that have not been published. Unseen novels have become plays that have not been staged. "When you think of all the wasted creativity and the wasted time it is appalling," he says.
Why Nichols fell so sharply out of vogue is a complicated tale. Undoubtedly, the transformation of the 70s generation of political playwrights into the 80s establishment played a part, and Nichols's own fractious relationship with the theatre couldn't have helped. But perhaps more importantly there was a strong perception that he had fallen into the classic trap set for successful writers. A fellow playwright says, "You can see it in David Mercer and John Osborne, and perhaps even in Harold Pinter. As you become successful you move away from your class and your subject matter. Your field of vision gets narrower and narrower and in the end your work can become arid and lack the density of earlier pieces." Nichols doesn't agree. "Alan Bennett doesn't have any trouble getting his plays on. I am an autobiographical writer. Just because I am a playwright doesn't mean I don't have a life. If I thought that was the problem don't you think I would have done something to change it?"
The writer Robert Heller has been a long-time friend and thinks Nichols has remained pretty much the same throughout the vicissitudes of his career. "He's melancholic, feels under-appreciated and has a wicked sense of humour," says Heller. "It always seemed a bit absurd to me that he thought he was in competition with other writers. The real competition is with yourself and bugger the others. But maybe he thinks that in comparison to the potential Peter Nichols, the real Peter Nichols has not done as well as he should have done. But he has done bloody well. He might not be in the O'Neill school when history looks back, but he will certainly be at the Rattigan level. And I think Rattigan is very good."
The painter Patrick Hughes is another old friend. "He seems to have made that transition from angry young man to acerbic old man without passing through the gentle uplands of middle age. But he would never be as rude to people as his friend John Osborne was. He is still hilarious, and sort of profound company. He knows things ebb and flow. Particularly in the youth culture, people get passed over and then they get revived. There are very few who are always on the inside track."
Peter Nichols was born in Bristol in 1927, the first child of Richard and Violet Nichols. He has one brother, Geoffrey, five years younger than him. When asked whether he had a happy childhood he replies, "who can say". His father was a "representative in dry saltery" for the Cooperative Society - "he hated being called a grocery salesman" - and they had a car which, in the 1920s, was "pretty classy".
"Essentially, it was a Victorian home," says Nichols. "My father was a Victorian and was non gambling, non smoking and non drinking. I think my grandfather drank and my father used to resent having to fetch his beer when a boy. If any of my plays are really autobiographical then Forget-me-not-Lane - about how we all end up like our parents - is about what tensions there were in that house. But they were extremely decent, self-sacrificing parents who paid for me and my brother to go to grammar school, and I repaid them by total laziness and indifference to learning. I never got a prize or was praised in any way for writing while there."
Nichols said he didn't know what university was when he left school. "I couldn't care less. I wanted to go to Hollywood. I was completely stage-struck. The highlights of my year were the Christmas pantomime and the summer circus. In between I would play with my toy circus and toy pantomime. And I'd go to the cinema and occasionally the theatre and variety shows."
His route in to this theatrical world was unexpected. He was conscripted into the Royal Air Force just as the war was ending. After being turned down by the entertainment corps in India he was accepted in Singapore. "And that's when my education really began." He was in the same troupe as Kenneth Williams, Stanley Baxter and John Schlesinger, who was a conjurer at the time. The experience was turned into his 1977 hit musical and film Privates On Parade, and was strangely echoed later in the sit-com It Ain't Half Hot Mum.
More immediately, it provided a launch pad into the world of legit theatre. When demobbed in 1951 he enrolled at the Bristol Old Vic theatre school and two years later began life as a professional actor. He says he did some pretty good work but didn't get enough jobs. His biggest success was playing Count Dracula in fortnightly rep in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen. "My favourite notice said, 'Count Dracula is no longer so fearsome'. But I knew in my heart that acting wasn't the right thing for me."
His father had given him £500, which he spent trying to be an actor and writer. He wrote some plays but didn't submit them because he didn't feel they were good enough. Friends advised him to become a teacher because the long holidays would give him time to write. He got a place in a teacher training college in Hertfordshire and in 1959 made two ambitious new year resolutions; that he would get a play performed and that he would get married. At the time he had no girlfriend and no play.
The play issue was solved when he won a BBC playwriting competition - despite never having seen a television play - for Walk On The Grass, a family comedy. Soon after, Granada screened a second work, Promenade, about a group of young people on a weekend in Brighton. The wife issue was solved after his lung collapsed and he was hospitalised in Bristol. He received a letter from a childhood friend, Thelma Reed, who was also a teacher. She visited him and a few months later, on December 28 1959, they were married.
"I was in hospital when the second television play went on. Granada said they would give me a monitor to watch it in a private ward but the matron wouldn't allow that so I had to see it on a ward television set. Unfortunately there was a cup final on the other station and so I forced everyone to watch this incredibly arty play, which was described as 'pastel-coloured Fellini', so it was a bit awkward."
With his career now taking off they both gave up teaching and moved to Devon. Their first daughter, Abigail, was born soon afterwards. The Nichols had three further children in the next five years. Their daughter Louise is an IT coordinator at a primary school in London, Daniel works with redundant coal miners in South Wales and has written a musical which is being staged in Cardiff shortly, and Catherine is a solicitor in Darlington. They have five grandchildren.
Abigail was born severely brain-damaged and went into hospital on a full-time basis when she was three. She died aged 10. Had they anticipated such a short life expectancy? "Well, we always hoped so. There was nothing we could do for her. Abigail went into hospital just after our third child was born and stayed there the rest of her life. She was always physically very beautiful. She had lovely eyes and her features were very fine. I used to say why me? Why us? But then I thought, why not us?"
Nichols was finding it increasingly difficult to earn a living as a television playwright. Fellow playwright and old Bristol friend Charles Wood lent the couple money, as did Nichols's agent, Peggy Ramsey. "It was all getting a bit of a struggle and then John Boorman, who was working in the features section in BBC Bristol, asked me if I'd like to write this caper film like A Hard Day's Night for the pop band the Dave Clark 5. I said not really, because it looked pretty much like rubbish. 'What would we get out of it?' I asked. John said he would get a Hollywood contract and I'd get the money to write my stage play. And he was right."
The result was A Day In The Death Of Joe Egg, a tragi-comedy about a couple with a severely handicapped child. Michael Blakemore directed it at the Citizens' Theatre in Glasgow after it had been turned down by all the London west end managers. "Peter and I had been very good friends," says Blakemore. "The Nichols stayed at our flat when they were in London and they were with us when the doctor told them how severe Abigail's brain damage was. It was almost a resignation issue for me when it became very contentious with the theatre board. A lot of people thought it was sick comedy but it was a study in how people cope with this kind of disaster. The Nichols coped through humour. It was an awful time for them and it is, of course, the great irony of his life that this catastrophe was the thing that made his name and his fortune."
Nichols has recently seen in the British Library the Lord Chamberlain's case papers - in 1967 he was stage censor - relating to Joe Egg. "The papers say, 'it is a play about an over-sexed schoolteacher in Bristol with a handicapped child written, I suspect, by an over-sexed schoolteacher in Bristol with a handicapped child'." Lines such as "legs thrashing about" had to be cut, but more seriously, it was thought the play would offend the parents of handicapped children if the child was depicted. It was seriously suggested that a ventriloquist's dummy was used instead of a child.
Nichols won this battle and the play received good reviews, particularly from the Guardian. "All the London crowd flew up to see it," Nichols says, "and I got a phone call from Peggy Ramsey saying Albert Finney wants to take it as it is, Bernard Delfont wants to tour it first, and Kenneth Tynan wants it for the National Theatre. The choice was mine. It was one of those Cinderella things."
Michael Blakemore says he was very lucky to find Peter and Peter probably was lucky to find him. "It was the most exciting period of our lives. We were both interested in the same things. We loved the huge vitality, discipline and lack of pretensions of the very best commercial work we had seen as children, the very best of Hollywood; movies like Casablanca, the Astaire and Rogers films. Peter also loved music hall and the skills of the great comedians." They were both interested in applying these techniques to more serious subjects. "We wanted this constant collision where the style was comic but the content was not. That collision causes a very exciting frisson in the theatre."
Joe Egg went on to Broadway, became a film starring Alan Bates and Janet Suzman. It began an astonishing run of success for Nichols. Ken Tynan asked for a play for the National Theatre and The National Health went on to win the 1969 Evening Standard best play award. Forget-me-not Lane was staged at Greenwich in 1971. Then there was a trio of works for the RSC; the camp concert party romp Privates On Parade, Passion Play, and Poppy, in which he subverted Britain's only true contribution to world theatre, the pantomime, by setting his acute critique of empire in the opium wars. Despite all the critical success Nichols was still dissatisfied with the theatre, and after Poppy won best musical in 1982 he walked away.
"It's been said that I am famously difficult to work with but I had one problem with Terry Hands, who directed Poppy, and that was an entirely artistic row, nothing else." Hands described him as "a wayward, curiously self-destructive genius". Nichols says, "we had a genuine disagreement and I was unwise enough to make it public. After that I got pissed off with the theatre. It was such a lot of pain and misery and the rewards were not so great. Joe Egg made us a great deal of money but by the standards of someone like a director it is nothing. So I left Camden Town and went off to write novels in the middle of Shropshire."
Nichols says that the money from Joe Egg stopped being, "anything to write home about 10 years ago. But luckily, when we were doing well, my accountant suggested a pension. We never thought things would get so bad that I couldn't earn a living through writing but they did, and for the last 10 years or so we have lived off the pension, so it was a very shrewd decision."
Three years after they moved to Shropshire, John Osborne became a neighbour and, almost inevitably, the two had a row just before Nichols moved back to London. "But as Mark Twain said when receiving the Légion d'honneur, with John 'that is an honour few escape'." The argument was over who would pay a wine bill. The next day Osborne sent his gardener to Nichols with a note, "full of invective and in which the word 'commonness' was used". The two didn't speak again before Osborne died.
"I was very fond of John, and we have made peace with his wife Helen now," says Nichols. He moved back to London, he says, because "I just got fed up looking at sheep and decided I was a city person. I was a playwright. That's what I did. It wasn't a feeling of obligation. People were hardly making me do it, everything I wrote was being turned down." His last new play to make it to London was A Piece Of My Mind, in 1987. It was about a man who retired to the country to write a novel, failed and turned it into a play. This time the reviewers did turn on Nichols - "another piece of advice I would give young writers is not to have a character called The Critic who lives in a toilet in your play".
Apart from Blue Murder, in Bristol, no new plays have been seen since, although a radio version of So Long Life, an update of his family plays of the 60s, written three years ago, will be broadcast on Radio 4 later this month. He is also in early discussions with an actor and director about staging another three-year-old play, Pursued By A Bear, a Pirandellian piece featuring Sherlock Holmes. But first comes Passion Play.
"Sam Mendes asked me to come up with a few suggestions for plays, of which Passion Play was one, and it also happened to be on the Donmar's wish list," says director Michael Grandage. "The great thing about it is that it must have been in his head in the late 70s, and 20 years later the language - with the exception of them drinking Cinzano Bianco - has not dated at all. It doesn't feel like a period piece. His dialogue is brilliant and his command of structure is almost faultless. He stood for the 'well made play', which is a terrible phrase, but he took it that step further in terms of subject matter. Nichols plays are great to study at drama school and it would be fantastic if some of the others could be revived again. He was a very influential writer."
Michael Frayn agrees. "One of the things that influenced me was when he said you have to take note of the existence of the audience. The audience has a tremendous affect on the course of a performance. I have very much taken the idea that the audience is there and you have to do something about them."
But the problems of getting an audience in the first place have taken their toll. "I did get very depressed about this business of the plays not being staged," says Nichols. "Therapy didn't do too much for me, but the anti-depressants worked very well, they took away the pain of depression. I was surprised that the therapist didn't want to read my work. She could have said that it was completely untrustworthy or whatever, but I'm not someone who has been dammed up about things, I've talked about myself to audiences for 40 years.
"I haven't been depressed since then but of course I am fed up that my plays aren't staged. But that comes out more as anger than depression. I don't drive it inwards, I drive it outwards, which is much healthier".
Nichols jokes that coming from Bristol he would know what to do if things really get too much. "The Clifton suspension bridge is such a temptation. As a boy I used to think about it a lot. Just jumping off. I think all Bristolians carry that around in their head; 'there's always the bridge. A single ticket to Bristol please'."
While he is happy to acknowledge the autobiographical elements in his work he warns that it goes only so far. "Evelyn Waugh, who was much more autobiographical than people think, said that 'I am not I, he is not he, and they are not they'. I think that sums it up very well. But I don't care that people lumber me with being autobiographical, as long as other people don't get offended by it. My brother keeps saying, 'can't you disguise it a little bit more' but the actual life is only a starting point. The couple in Joe Egg weren't us. I couldn't have started the play until I pushed myself into the background." In fact, Nichols has written a very entertaining autobiography, Feeling You're Behind, that took him up to 1967, and has kept a diary for most of his life. It is currently being prepared for publication.
But mostly he keeps with the plays. Stephen Sondheim says he has been a victim of what has happened to non-musical theatre. "It is in dire straits in America where virtually all new plays are off Broadway. There is no off Broadway in the UK, only fringe theatres like the Donmar, which put on limited runs. So new plays, even by established playwrights, don't have the market they used to. I've seen Peter in his bitter stage and his accepting stage, but what is wonderful is that he keeps on writing. He does a great deal of complaining but always goes back to the typewriter. That maybe is the plight of many writers these days."
"People do go out of vogue," says Michael Frayn. "It is still extremely painful for Peter but when Joe Egg was revived a few years ago in a terrific production [at the King's Head, Islington] it was wonderful and did speak to a new generation. I'm sure it will be revived at the National sooner or later."
In the meantime, Nichols keeps working and at 72 years of age he keeps dreaming. "If I won the lottery I know exactly what I would do," he laughs. "I would put myself in the Alan Ayckbourn or Andrew Lloyd Webber position and buy my own theatre. I would hire a company and have them do my plays over and over and over again, not caring if people came or not. I would love to do that. It would be wonderful to see the un-produced plays on a stage."
Life at a glance: Peter Nichols
Born: July 31 1927, Bristol.
Married: 1959 Thelma Reed (one son, three daughters, Abigail deceased).
Education: Bristol Grammar School; Bristol Old Vic theatre school 1951-53; Trent Park Teachers College 1958-60.
Occupations: Royal Air Force 1945-49; actor 1953-58; teacher 1958-60.
Some television plays: Walk On The Grass 1959; Promenade 1960; Hearts and Flowers 1970.
Some films: Catch Us If You Can 1965; Georgy Girl 1967; Joe Egg 1971; Privates on Parade1983.
Some Plays: A Day In The Death Of Joe Egg 1967; The National Health 1969; Forget-me-not Lane 1971; Chez Nous 1973; The Freeway 1974; Privates On Parade 1977; Passion Play 1980; Poppy 1982; Blue Murder 1995.
Autobiography: Feeling You're Behind 1984.
• Passion Play is at the Donmar Warehouse from 13 April-10 June.
