‘Search me, squire’

I think everyone was a little nervous of Harold. Including Harold, sometimes. He was affable, warm, generous, impulsive — and unpredictable. Like his plays, where the hyper-banal surfaces — the synthetic memories and false nostalgia of Old Times, the aural drivel of Rose in The Room, the bogus familial warmth of The Homecoming — are fragile and about to be displaced by something ugly and authentic, something obscure and violent. Plays where on countless occasions — think of Lenny in The Homecoming or the alcoholic Hirst in No Man’s Land — a speech will take off into dramatic Tourette’s, unstoppable and at the edge of sense. The plays are edgy, alert to something sinister at the periphery. Harold once described his plays as being about the weasel under the cocktail cabinet. Later, he repudiated this description. In fact, it is the perfect encapsulation, but no one likes to be fixed in a formulated phrase — particularly a phrase of one’s own coinage. The plays are unstable, never more dangerous than when the surface of the dialogue is at its emptiest: think of One for the Road, with its grotesque affability — signalled by the title’s pub-speak — and its pragmatic, morally drained, unexcitable sadism.

‘Style’, wrote Buffon, ‘c’est l’homme.’ With Harold, it was as well to be aware that the weasel wasn’t confined to the drama. It might draw blood on the domestic stage. He was all about surprise and social suspense.

I first met him in Claire Tomalin’s basement kitchen in Gloucester Crescent at an impromptu party. Claire was the literary editor of the New Statesman. I was her summer stand-in theatre critic (while Benedict Nightingale was having his annual fortnight’s holiday) and I had reviewed No Man’s Land, with Gielgud as Spooner and Ralph Richardson as Hirst. Harold thanked me for the review.