This is an excellent and enjoyable holiday read, sat here in Tuscany, Italy in the dying days of May 2024. This Oberon book is evidently vital stuff for anyone with the slightest interest in immersing themselves in British theatrical culture from the 1950s to 1980s. Ramsay’s vying tones – emotionally baroque and austerely astringent – make this book’s appearance on a certain bookshelf in Rose Glass’s recent British horror film Saint Maud (2019) seem the inspired piece of set dressing it is.
I find Ramsay’s insights and feelings about drama, the purpose of writing, and her advocacy of talent and work over success and status highly persuasive. She has an awareness that writers and spectators are best when they have feelings about the characters they are witnessing. Plays should not merely be a weekend diversion, but should affect how you feel about life, and how to live it, sometimes imparting profound secrets.
While these words can apply fairly well to cinema and television, it is very clear that Ramsay does not seem as interested in those mediums as in theatre or literature, though clearly most of her clients whose correspondence is included here did notably screen work, especially single TV plays. Her tart dismissal of John Hopkins seems a veiled dig at the domestic ‘enclosed room’ nature of certain TV dramas. Interestingly, nor does she seem to admire client Robert Bolt’s lucrative and even OSCAR winning stabs at film screenplays, feeling that these expansive spectacular epics like Lawrence of Arabia (1962) are also taking Bolt away from the intense and direct human communication of theatre.
Interestingly, while Ramsay’s judgements and interpretations seem largely unerring, her perception of the underlying theme of John Bowen’s Robin Redbreast (1970) is a notable snapshot of strange early 1970s attitudes, in taking Norah’s disturbing impregnation as being an event of necessary pagan vitality.
This book of collected letters from a renowned theatrical agent contains an honest waspishness that reveals much about the temper of the times it documents. She doesn’t often pronounce directly on politics, but when she does, there is an utter steadfast morality in the way she urges Alan Ayckbourn and Donald Howarth to do the right thing and join John Mortimer, Peter Nichols, Alan Plater et al in a cultural boycott of Apartheid South Africa by not permitting productions of their plays there. These letters from 1970-71 nobly reflect Ramsay’s later advice to David Hare in March 1974 to ‘Look OUTWARD, my dear child. Don’t muck about picking at your entrails, and shitting on yourself.’
Colin Chambers does an excellent job in selecting telling and entertaining letters, though given the richness of the archive in the British Library, a scholar like myself wishes this had been at least 300 pages, to incorporate even more. Nonetheless, it’s apt that key figures such as Ayckbourn, Hare, Orton and Bolt do constitute the book’s mainstay. Simon Callow’s foreword is exceptionally controlled: distilling the essence of Ramsay’s extraordinary cultural contribution. Implicitly, when reading, we feel the cavernous sense of cultural loss and the closing down of challenging voices and imaginative possibilities that have arisen with Thatcherite philistinism and the linked Blairite view of the Cultural Industries as primarily businesses. Not that Ramsay is not attentive to the financial imperatives for writers, but she realises that material comfort is often a byproduct which comes later, and is far less important than how art changes our minds and helps us understand life.
As notably, Margaret Ramsay’s high standards in her judgement of scripts that clients send her are grounded in her immersion in the European naturalist and modernist canon – Beckett, Gide, Genet, Ibsen, Chekhov, Strindberg – and expressed through her absolute commitment to talented playwrights with distinctive, unique voices.
May's Britain... 