Plays: Two [antikvár]

Introduction Writing for Myself Based on a conversation with Richard Findlater published in The Twentieth Century, February 1961. The first time I went to a theatre, as far as I remember, was to see Donald Wolfit in Shakespeare. I saw his Lear six times, and later acted with him in it, as one of the king's knights. I saw very few plays, in fact, before I was twenty. Then I acted in too many. I did eighteen months in Ireland with Anew McMaster, playing one-night stands in fit-ups, and I've worked all over the place in reps - Huddersfield, Torquay, Bournemouth, Whitby, Colchester, Birmingham, Chesterfield, Worthing, Palmers Green and Richmond. I was an actor for about nine years (under the name of David Baron) and I would like to do more. I played Goldberg in The Birthday Party at Cheltenham recently, and enjoyed it very much. I'd like to play that part again. Yes, my experience as an actor has influenced my plays - it must have -though it's impossible for me to put my finger on it exactly. I think I certainly developed some feeling for construction which, believe it or not, is important to me, and for speakable dialogue. I had a pretty good notion in my earlier plays of what would shut an audience up; not so much what would make them laugh; that I had no ideas about. Whenever I write for the stage I merely see the stage I've been used to. I have worked for theatre in the round and enjoyed it, but it doesn't move me to write plays with that method in mind. I always think of the normal picture-frame stage which I used as an actor. All the time I was acting I was writing. Not plays. Himdreds of poems - about a dozen are worth republishing - and short prose pieces. A lot of these were in dialogue, and one was a monologue which I later turned into a revue sketch. I also wrote a novel. It was autobiographical, to a certain extent, based on part of my youth in Hackney. I wasn't the central