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Steven Pimlott died on 14 February, after preparing this production, gathering the cast for it, and rehearsing it for something more than a week. We had been talking about The Rose Tattoo since he relinquished the reins at Chichester in 2005, though he would have first directed Molière’s The Misanthrope had not his cancer diagnosis last summer temporarily cut short our discussions. When he went into remission last autumn, it was to The Rose Tattoo that we returned. Neither of us said it, but it seemed an urgent necessity to stage one of the twentieth century’s most life-affirming plays.
We started talking about the theatre nearly 40 years ago, at Manchester Grammar School – though it may be more accurate to say that I started listening to him talk about the theatre, as when I arrived at the school he was, at 14, already the Dramatic Society’s leading light (his Gertrude and Mother Courage legendary), and already a dazzling talker. Our first collaboration was in 1968, both of us cast as pierrots in Oh What A Lovely War! I remember it as a terrific show; and both of us often reminisced about the ambition and pizzazz of our school productions, happily acknowledging that we learned much of what we later became from Brian Derbyshire and Brian Phythian, the two wonderful English teachers who directed most of them. Steven was, as ever, the undisputed highlight of Oh What A Lovely War!, delivering the recruiting song ‘I’ll Make A Man Of You’ with outrageously suggestive allure, in an off-the-shoulder satin evening gown. There was a Dramatic Society outing a few months later to see the recently released Richard Attenborough film. We gave it a grudging thumbs-up, though there was universal dismay at Maggie Smith’s failure to measure up to Pimlott.
Where Steven led, I followed. We both played in the school orchestra and in the local youth orchestra – Steven a marvellous oboist, I an optimistic flautist. When I went up to Cambridge, he was my entrée into the theatre there. I acted in his shows, he in mine, and I played his servant (naturally) in Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. I followed him to English National Opera, as a staff producer. His friends, who were legion, struggled gleefully to keep up with his enthusiasms, which acknowledged no boundaries between high art and low. He could be inflamed by Mozart, Agatha Christie, Shakespeare, Gilbert and Sullivan, French classical drama, Blackpool Pleasure Beach, or all of them at the same time. He was a passionately well-read man, and while it wouldn’t be true to say that, like Shakespeare’s exiled Duke, he could see good in everything (he was magnificently dismissive of what he didn’t like), there was nobody more catholic in his taste, or more generous.
In particular, he was, more than any other English director, completely at ease outside the English tradition. He was fluent in French and German (he met his German wife, Daniela Bechly, when he directed her in a French opera in Krefeld); and he was mightily impressive in Italian and Russian. More importantly, he knew and felt their cultures from within, and his productions of continental classics signally refused to bring to them the temperate smoothness that tends to characterise our own theatre. He exposed contradictions and celebrated them, in art as in life. He was often more a poet than a narrator, as much a mystic as an analyst. He brought these gifts to the English repertoire, too, alert always to those things in heaven and earth that are undreamt of in conventional critical philosophies. His RSC Richard II was one of the tiny handful of great Shakespeare productions that I have seen.
Tennessee Williams was right up his street. Steven responded viscerally to Williams’ emotional rawness, his poetic extravagance, his sympathy with those clinging on by their fingernails. The Sicilianness of The Rose Tattoo didn’t seem strange to him, though he acknowledged and embraced everything that is strange about the play. We all assumed he would be able to see it through, though he and I had agreed that if anything happened, I’d be his back-up. In the event, his cancer returned suddenly and aggressively, and in his absence I am working together with him for the first time in nearly thirty years. I don’t know how close the show is to the one he imagined. The day before he died, I told him I’d follow Tennessee’s stage directions until he was ready to return to work, and he replied that all he was doing was what Tennessee suggested. Of course, there are any number of ways you can follow a stage direction, say a line, create a world and tell a story; and there was nobody with whom it was more stimulating, or more fun, to talk about them than Steven. It is impossible to accept that he isn’t here to continue the conversation.
© Nicholas Hytner, March 2007. This essay was originally written for the programme for the National Theatre’s current production of The Rose Tattoo.