|
||||||
|
||||||
|
||||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
||
| FEATURES | BY GERALD ISAAMAN |
 Bernard Kops (above) and (below) his new play, Playing Sinatra, at the New End Theatre, Hampstead  |
Kops is 76. He has white wispy hair and a wizard’s beguiling face. Yet he is still profoundly prolific. He wakes promptly at 5 am every day and follows a strict routine working until 8 am. “You can’t be creative for longer than that,” he insists at his home in Canfield Gardens, West Hampstead. “If you use your energy it doesn’t leave you tired. It’s a strange paradox, like the old saying, use it or lose it. If I sit around I just fall asleep. Somehow work overrides everything.” So, the dramatist, poet and novelist, who left school at 13 during the Blitz, completed a new play last week. “It’s one of the hardest I’ve written – that’s exciting, I hope,” he says. “And I’ve just started work on another.” His plays from the past, in particular The Dreams of Anne Frank, are still performed round the world. This week another one, Playing Sinatra, came home to the tiny New End Theatre, Hampstead, where it will run until September 7. Playing Sinatra is a dark comedy dating from a decade ago and is described by Kops as one of the few well-made plays he has written. “Normally my plays are looser and spread more,” he explains. “This one is not about Sinatra – it’s about a brother and sister obsessed with Sinatra. He’s their idol. “It’s all about a displacement of their own situation and how they put everything on to him as a heroic character, some icon, something people madly do, a folie a deux really.” Kops has had his own follies since he was born into the poverty of London’s East End, the seventh son of Dutch-Jewish working class parents. He started writing at the end of the war but had to wait until 1958 before he won headlined fame with The Hamlet of Stepney Green. It was a remarkable transition from selling books from a stall and fruit from a West End barrow. He hasn’t stopped writing since. “Work drives me and I drive work,” he explains. “But there is a price to pay. Creativity is so close to the edge of emotional danger. If you live a long time and make mistakes, it poisons your work.” He tells the story of a female character in a film called Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer, which he first saw in Israel. She is taking part in the forthcoming battle and asks the rabbi the night before: “Why is it that those who believe suffer the most?” And the rabbi replies: “Those who believe the most are in the avant garde and attract the first onslaught of the enemy.” Kops sighs again and adds: “So you place yourself in a sort of jeopardy. And the trouble is that unless you do, you don’t write well. Writing is very dangerous. You are living on the edge of your own mortality.” Kops did that in his early days, when he frequented Soho and mixed with the cosmopolitan crowd that included Francis Bacon, Quentin Crisp and Ironfoot Jack. Yet he felt inadequate and became a drug addict, dosing himself with “black bomber” amphetamines. “I felt quite lost between me and Soho and could not compromise the two,” he reflects. “I had to make a decision about which one did what I wanted. Drugs were a kind of third alternative. It took away the problem, covered it over.” He had a nervous breakdown – and got over it when success first engulfed him. But failure inevitably followed – Kenneth Tynan stuck his critical knife in – and Kops was back on drugs, bumping again through life and using the experience to write novels. “At one point I found the theatre very threatening,” says Kops, his honesty always rising to the surface. “You go over the hurdle so many times – the success, the failure, the failure, the success. “So I started to write novels. I wrote one or two under the influence of drugs. But then I remembered the Irish proverb: Devil mounted soon rides the horse to death.” It was an addiction that lasted for 25 years before he broke free. On an occasion in the mid-1970s, it resulted in him considering suicide by driving his car into a wall in Maida Vale one difficult night. Instead, he went home to have breakfast with his wife, Erica, and their four children. West Hampstead has been his home for 40 years and has been part of the inspiration for a writer recognised now for his ultimate sense and sensitivity, his wit and worrying Jewish wisdom. He called a pamphlet of poetry he wrote in 1988 Barricades in West Hampstead and used it to extol his love for his flowering family living in a “ridiculous oasis” off the frightening Finchley Road. It provided warming friendship with neighbours such as the late film director Lindsay Anderson. Indeed, Kops remembers Anderson being interested in his play, Who Shall I Be Tomorrow? “I asked Lindsay who he thought would be right for the lead,” adds Kops. He thought Rachel Roberts. “I replied: ‘I think she’d be perfect’. “We often used to make quips like this. Rachel was long dead and I knew how much Lindsay loved and missed her. She killed herself in California and Lindsay never got over the shock.” “‘So you’d like Rachel, would you, for your play? Well, why not?’ said Lindsay. He went off into another room and returned with an urn and plonked it on the coffee table. Here she is, he said. The incident was as stark as a scene in one of his films.” Today, he and his wife go on walks to Hampstead Village, over the Heath to Kenwood and Parliament Hill. The High Street still has a buzz for him, though he finds it intolerably expensive. “It’s still beautiful to walk in the streets,” he muses. “They’ve still got something. I was in Admiral’s Walk the other day, looking at John Galsworthy’s house where he wrote the Forsyte Saga. There were two cars there and there was this man cleaning one of them in the garage. “Galsworthy was such a wonderful writer, and I thought whether he would have appreciated this sullen young man living in his old house. Time certainly moves on in different ways.” He finds the West End theatres now packed with impossibly expensive musicals, the best new drama coming from the Donmar, the Almeida, the Hampstead Theatre and definitely from the provinces. “I walked out of the musical Jerry Springer the Opera,” he declares. “I found it pathetic and salacious. I don’t mind salaciousness but when it is pathetic and also derivative then I do mind paying an awful lot of money to be bombarded by dross.” He remains, essentially, a survivor, forever seeking to fulfil his dreams, still making a living as a wordsmith, now able to salute himself as a man without any debts. In dark moments of doubt, he has his growing grandchildren to sustain him. “I have two feelings I express,” he points out poignantly. “If I think about my own life and my own world I’m secure. If I think about the world outside I am not so sure. It is a duality one has. “Fortunately, the fear of the outside doesn’t corrode what is going on inside. Having a family is something that cannot be taken away. It’s real gift. I am a happy man.” |
|