‘The blazing valveless trumpets unfurled their fanfares with thrilling power,’ PAGE 37


TELEVISION Memories of the few


David Jason: The Battle of Britain ITV


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or a male of a certain age, nothing is more beautiful than a Spitfire soaring over the English countryside. The loveliest of all killing machines provided the opening sequence for ITV’s commemorative documentary (September 12), in which the popular actor looked back the events of summer 1940 with the help of some of those who were there. (Jason was six months old at the time.) The outline of the Battle of Britain is etched into the national consciousness, and this docu - mentary did not set out to alter the picture or offer a revisionist view of events. All the expected elements of the story were in place: brave young fighter pilots, hopelessly out- numbered; dedicated ground crew struggling to keep the planes in the air; civilian observers watching the skies as massive armadas of German aircraft flew overhead; Waafs staring into primitive radar screens or plotting the movements of the planes in the operations room in Uxbridge. Familiar though it may be, it is still a remarkable story, and the elderly men and women interviewed by Jason enjoyed telling it. The pilots were particularly good value, modest, laconic and careful to praise the con- tributions of those on the ground. The Spitfire, they told us, was “childishly simple to fly”, “not vicious in any way”, but not a good gun- platform. It carried only 15 seconds’ worth of ammunition, and when you opened up on your target it “sort of shimmied about a bit”. The only way to be sure of hitting a German aircraft was to get so close that you could almost touch it; 97 per cent of your bullets, someone said, were off-target. “The whole thing was a complete shambles, really,” said one pilot, 21 at the time. “It was chaos. You did your own thing.” Roaming the country on an ancient


Triumph motorcycle, Jason took us to old air- fields, radar installations and museums, careful always to pay tribute to the many whose work supported the Few. He met and charmed former aircraft mechanics (“They’d come back full of holes – I’m talking about the pilots”) and members of the civilian Observer Corps, whose job it was to track the incoming planes once they’d flown past the chain of coastal radar towers. “Without us it could not have been won,” said one. Jason also praised the contribution of the girls in the control room. One former Waaf, 19 at the time, recalled the “tremendous spirit” among


Sir David Jason and former Waaf Hazel Gregory


But we learned that Hitler’s miscalculations


them. “Nobody ever thought for a moment that we wouldn’t win.” It was teamwork on a grand scale. “It’s the whole country that won the Battle of Britain, really,” said one man, with only slight exaggeration.


THEATRE Mind games


Deathtrap NOËL COWARD THEATRE, LONDON


Martin Amis’ stories are essentially support systems for the sentences, while, in a Jeffrey Archer book, the prose is a functional delivery system for the plots. Tom Stoppard cheerfully admits to finding plots problematic but writes effortlessly epigrammatic dialogue; with Alan Ayckbourn, the virtues are reversed. The American author Ira Levin (1929- 2007) was a sheer genius of scenario. Three of his novels became a trio of movies with central premises that entered cultural history and have been endlessly reworked by other writers: demonic possession in Rosemary’s Baby, scientific manipulation of society in The Stepford Wives and the horrific possibil- ities of cloning in The Boys from Brazil. This brilliance at populist storytelling was also demonstrated in one of the most successful theatrical thrillers of the twentieth century, rivalled really only by Rope, Dial M for Murder and Sleuth. Deathtrap, now accorded a West End revival


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so lavish that its marketing includes a cinema- style online trailer filmed on location, ran for years in New York and London at the turn of the 1980s and became a movie. It’s a tough piece to discuss because it operates through a succession of unexpected reversals and twists, of which a new viewer should ideally


s a general rule, writers tend to be better at style than structure, or vice versa.


played a part: when the RAF was at breaking point, with more than 300 pilots killed, the Luftwaffe suddenly dropped its devastating campaign against airfields and turned to the cities, as the Battle of Britain gave way to the Blitz. Hitler’s invasion, Operation Sealion, had been scheduled for September 1940: the troop-carrying barges were already assembled in France. But it depended on the Germans achieving air superiority, and the RAF had denied them that. The invasion was first post- poned and then abandoned. It was the first reverse suffered by the Nazis since the war began. How did we win? “We were fighting over our own country,” said one pilot, “and we knew what we were fighting for.” John Morrish


be completely unaware – the programme includes a plea to keep the secrets to avoid spoiling the fun of future audiences – and, indeed, Levin, a perfectionist, even disliked ticket-buyers being advised that there would be unspecified shocks. He preferred an audi- ence to be taken entirely by surprise. Matthew Warchus’ restaging retains the


1978 setting: a necessity because typewriters are vital props and the question of whether a carbon-copy of a typescript exists is of central importance – details that are irrelevant in a digital world. The central character, Sidney Bruhl, has written one legendary theatre thriller, The Murder Game, but failed to follow it, although the royalties from his classic fund a massive study in a converted barn at his Connecticut house, hung high with the antique weapons he collects. Bruhl tells his wife, Myra, loyal but phys- ically frail, that his writer’s block has been worsened by the arrival in the post of Deathtrap, a stage chiller written by Clifford Anderson, a young writer whom Sidney taught on a playwrighting course. The veteran drama- tist would love this play to be his and suggests conspiring with his wife to make it so, inviting the apprentice writer to the heavily armed barn with the promise of advice on making his plot watertight. Part of Levin’s mastery as a crafter of plots is that, for at least half an hour of his Deathtrap, it seems obvious what will happen and, in fact, the viewer’s basic expectations are rapidly ful- filled. But the magnificence of this piece is the way in which we must then repeatedly re- assess the events we have seen, with the jolts delivered so expertly that a cliché of frightening theatre – members of the audience jumping (Continued on page 36.)


18 September 2010 | THE TABLET | 35


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