Peter Brook (1968)

This London Film Festival screening of Tell Me Lies, its first public showing in this country since a brief appearance on its original release, was made all the more special by the presence of eighty-eight-year-old Peter Brook, who introduced the film and answered Clyde Jeavons’s and audience questions from the NFT1 stage afterwards.   Tell Me Lies has its origins in a theatre piece, US, conceived by Dennis Cannan and performed by the RSC at the Aldwych in 1966.  The punning title refers both to the United States and to the piece’s view that the US involvement in the Vietnam War also requires Britain (‘us’), whose way of life and fortunes are so bound up with America’s, to examine its conscience on the subject of Vietnam.   In Tell Me Lies, several RSC actors, more or less playing themselves, are moved by the photograph of a wounded, bandaged Vietnamese child to take a public position against the war.  Part drama and part documentary, the film shows these ‘characters’ engaging with actual conversations or protests about Vietnam that were taking place in London at the time.  (At one point, Mark Jones, in the central role, attends an event in which Paul Scofield, among others, is taking part.  The effect is somewhat surreal.  The actor Mark Jones, as a politically engaged actor called Mark, interviews the real Paul Scofield – who would go on to play the title role in Peter Brook’s next piece of cinema, the 1971 film of King Lear.)  It’s cause for celebration that Tell Me Lies has been restored (by the Technicolor Foundation and the Groupama Gan Foundation) and seen again but the Q&A that followed the BFI screening was more interesting than much of the film itself.

For once, the questions in a session of this kind were good ones.   What effect did working on the piece have on the RSC actors concerned after the cameras stopped rolling?   How did Brook stage the remarkable episode in which Mark Jones and Pauline Munro debate Vietnam with guests at a drinks party who include Kingsley Amis, Peregrine Worsthorne and Ivor Richard?   The answer was pretty straightforward:  Brook talked about a ‘directorial device’ which he then revealed to be Scotch – the great and the good had been invited to a party and given plenty to drink.  Presumably the well-oiled talkers were too absorbed in their debates, or even themselves, to wonder why they were being filmed – Brook didn’t otherwise explain what the guests thought of the cameras in the room.  The same questioner also asked about ‘the black actors’ in the party sequence.  ‘That was no black actor’, replied Brook sharply, ‘that was Stokely Carmichael’.   Fascinating as this section is as a piece of cinema, I could only agree with what Ivor Richard, then a junior minister in the Wilson government, had to say:  regardless of whether Britain was morally compelled to oppose what the Americans were doing in Vietnam, our potential influence on US policy was very limited indeed.

What was the process of adapting the stage material for the screen?   And could Brook – who, in his introductory remarks, described the world situation of today as worse than that of 1967 – elaborate on how he compared then and now, and explain what action he thought was needed in 2013?   In response to these questions, Brook was charming but cryptic-going-on-slippery.  He talked interestingly about the translation of Marat-Sade from stage to screen (and how crucial he felt it was for the camera to be mobile enough to replicate a theatre audience’s ability to choose what to focus on) but he was comparatively vague about Tell Me Lies.  He said that none of the actors in the film had been in the theatre piece but I’d be very surprised if it was true that, as he also said, each scene in the film was purely improvised.   The more choric or choreographed sequences – one featuring Glenda Jackson and Michael Williams particularly comes to mind – must have been worked up  (and, I’d guess, drawn from US)  to the same extent that the songs – words by Adrian Mitchell, music (by Richard Peaslee) – presumably were.  (Several of these numbers have an oddly conventional, big-band-ish orchestration.)  Brook refused to be drawn into giving advice on political action (‘it’s up to ourselves – each one of us’).  At the same time, he qualified his earlier remark about things getting worse by suggesting that more widespread cynicism about politicians was a step in the right direction.

Peter Brook took Clyde Jeavons to task for describing Tell Me Lies as ‘agitprop’ – it is, Brook insisted, ‘ “agit” but not “prop“ ‘.   He felt strongly that the piece did not promote a particular point of view about the Vietnam War although it seems inconceivable that anyone watching the film could infer that a decent case could be made for American involvement:  it’s the one-sidedness that makes Tell Me Lies, although it’s a valuable historical record, sometimes tedious.  Brook explained that the film’s title was a sarcastic dig not only at politicians’ duplicity but also at the weakness of the people who elect them.  The imperative is, in other words, a plea to governments, from those of us who’d rather not sustain a morally engaged position, to shelter us with falsehoods – give us an excuse for not facing the truth.  Clyde Jeavons praised Tell Me Lies for a radical dynamism that kept it fresh after nearly half a century and meant that ‘it could have been made today’.   What gives the film distinction is that it wouldn’t be made now – not, at any rate, by someone of the stature of Peter Brook.

20 October 2013