BEGIN….
No. You won’t get him. I was told. Don’t waste your time. Impossible. But I have always been stubborn and instinctive, and I knew that Anthony Minghella had a profound love of Beckett. I had seen it in the way he had directed Play for Channel 4. So I dared to do, believing never say never, and asked him to write a radio play to mark Samuel Beckett’s centenary. And he replied and said he would - but only if he could direct it too. But he wouldn’t charge Hollywood rates. Just the standard BBC rate would do. Elegiac, at times funny and intensely poetic, Eyes Down Looking was Anthony’s first radio play for 20 years.
‘You run the comb through the experience of your life, and some things stick. And you don’t know why they do. What DO they do, when we tell them to each other? What are they for?’
That’s what he said his play was about - the way our lives become stories even to ourselves, which we tell to others, pass on, and then get transformed. Like his great hero Samuel Beckett, Anthony believed that mankind is at heart, a storytelling animal, making sense out of pain and laughter, death and life, by telling tales. And like Beckett, Anthony also believed profoundly in the power of words, weighing them up carefully even when he spoke in his characteristically resonant voice with a reverence he so clearly felt each one deserved.
‘Do you think that word at the end of the 9th is right on the 13th page?
‘I am not sure about the balance of that line starting ‘the medal we bought him with the St Christopher on it and the wrong phone number on it.’
‘How do you think it would sound if we overlapped Mother’s voice on top of the Father’s?’
For 2 months, we exchanged phonecalls, texts and emails about Eyes Down Looking. He was excited and energised, and we worked together crazily on it, across time zones and geography, scrutinising every line of the emerging play, swapping notes and thoughts. He was in Lithuania producing an opera one week, then in New York another. I was talking to him in between talking to scientists in the Ukraine and Russia about nuclear physics. I was investigating a documentary to mark another anniversary - the Chernobyl disaster. But between us we found the gaps in time and space to work, work, work on this marvelous play. And it was the love of words which linked us. The ones on the computer screen. Or by text. Or the ones in the post. And I found I had the intense pleasure of working with someone who had the same passion to get it absolutely right - right to the very end. To that final full stop. Then silence.
“At the beginning of my life, I was an ill-educated and beligerant 6th former, who applied to do a drama degree at Hull, and then fell in love with Beckett in the most profound and adolescent way. He damaged me for life.”
It was characteristic of Anthony, that he would tell this story of his interview for a place at Hull with a disarming frankness. He confessed he had never heard of Beckett before he stepped into the interview room. So when he was asked about the great Irish writer in the interview, he blagged, remembering the words on the spine of a book. ‘Yes I love Beckett’s ennui.’ He had got it all comically wrong. But he also got it comically right too. He was offered the place at Hull and became inspired by Beckett. Went on to do a doctorate on him at Reading. Become a Patron of the Beckett International Foundation.
“Like Bach, Beckett has a mathematical language for the heart. He asks us why we write. Everytime you read something of Beckett’s, it asks us questions, demands a rigorous perfection, and makes us confront the necessity of writing.”
Anthony speaking again. Remembering Beckett. Reflecting on his writing. What are the words for? What is the sky for? Those are Anthony’s words in Eyes Down Looking. But they could be Beckett’s too. But that’s not the ‘all of it’. Because writing is also about memory - our relationship with time. ‘Eyes Down Looking’ confronts us also with the necessity of remembering. The play was infused by Anthony’s obsessions, shown clearly in his film ‘Truly Madly Deeply’ - his interest in ghosts and the twilight world of the line between life and death.
“Every day when I am in London, I walk across the heath to my office. I see these benches and I ask myself. Why do people put names on park benches. Part of our fiction, good or bad, is to comfort us that all the ghosts have a place in our life.”
These are the things I remember about Anthony. These words and thoughts. Intensely. But also laughter too. The sheer vaudeville in Eyes Down Looking, with the Father figure played by David Threlfall, the bingo caller in denial, calling the numbers like some spiv. ‘God’s in Heaven, number seven.’
“Laughter is the key to Beckett. His work is rooted in the vaudeville tradition. You have to remember, that if Beckett was sitting here with you today, he would be talking about Buster Keaton. The vaudeville tradition was a close tenplate for him
and his writing. The profound agony and silliness of it all.”
The why of it all.
Those words. In place.
A year later, I am working for the Arvon Foundation. Anthony is one of the charity’s most devoted Patrons. He organised the extraordinary Love Letters fundraising event. He taught on our courses. Ian McMillan, the poet, who presents The Verb for BBC Radio 3 and with whom I worked, started his life as a young writer on an Arvon course and became inspired.
The paths which join us. That’s a phrase Anthony used.
Anthony’s third play. The lost play. The play no-one has mentioned in the obituaries. But it’s a profound play. A great play. Close to his heart. So much so, that he asked for the broadcast rights to it, so it was only broadcast the once - on April 1st 2006. A ghost - presently absent.
What else? Where to End? To begin again - A wide heart, laughter, profound sincerity, an all encompassing love of words - Anthony.
‘Eyes Down Looking’ written and directed by Anthony Minghella was broadcast on BBC Radio 3 April 1st 2006 on The Verb, presented by Ian McMillan. The play starred Juliet Stevenson, Jude Law and David Threlfall. The producer was Ariane Koek.
