Charles Wood
Writer known for his gritty depictions of the military life, especially his Falklands play Tumbledown
CHARLES WOOD, who has died aged 87, was a soldier turned dramatist whose sardonic plays and scripts examined the gulf between pretension and reality in the Armed Forces and in show business. His scepticism towards military authority reached its zenith in the BBC television play Tumbledown (1988), based on his extensive conversations with Lt Robert Lawrence MC, of the Scots Guards, who had been left partially paralysed after being shot in the head during the Falklands War. The play, directed by Richard Eyre, depicted the indifference of the government and the public towards Lawrence (played by Colin Firth) as he struggled to rebuild his life.
Highly contentious, it was pulled at the last minute, with transmission postponed for seven months. The Daily Telegraph was incensed that “a playwright of the talent of Charles Wood” should “make sport with truth, and inflict pain upon those who lived and fought most closely with Lt Lawrence”. Just as shocking to some viewers, however, was the play’s depiction of the almost transcendental joy Lawrence took in the bloody excitements of combat.
Wood’s iconoclasm was also apparent in his screenplay for Tony Richardson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968), a salvage job after the original draft by John Osborne was subjected to an injunction following accusations of plagiarism. Wood memorably had John Gielgud’s Lord Raglan observe: “It will be a sad day for England when her armies are officered by men who know too well what they are doing – it smacks of murder.”
Wood’s experiences on that film were very lightly fictionalised in his most widely admired stage play, Veterans (Royal Court, 1972), which won the Evening Standard prize for best comedy. It featured two distinguished film actors making a military epic in Turkey: John Mills played the one based on Trevor Howard and Gielgud the one based on himself.
Gielgud’s performance was a collector’s piece in the annals of self-mockery, while Bob Hoskins gave a star-making turn as the foul-mouthed unit electrician, Bernie the Volt. But to Wood’s regret the play was denied a West End run as Gielgud had been contracted to another film engagement.
The military satire was combined with a disillusioned view of the film and theatre world that was equally typical. Wood went on to channel the frustrations of life as a dramatist into an alter ego, a blocked playwright called George Maple (played by George Cole), who appeared in the television plays A Bit of a Holiday and A Bit of an Adventure, and then a BBC sitcom, Don’t Forget to Write! (1977-79).
Maple endured constant humiliation at the hands of his more successful fellow dramatist Tom Lawrence (Francis Matthews), based on Wood’s neighbour in Bristol, Peter Nichols. Wood’s strong sense of professional rivalry was genuine; Nichols recorded in his Diaries that Wood’s reaction to news of Sean O’casey’s death was: “Another one less to worry about.”
Charles Gerald Wood was born on August 6 1932 on Guernsey, where his parents, John and Catherine Wood, were playing in his grandfather’s touring repertory company. He was educated at Chesterfield Grammar School and at King Charles I Grammar School in Kidderminster, where his parents were running a theatre.
He became interested in stage design and lighting and spent two years at Birmingham College of Art. At 18 he became a soldier for five years as a trooper and an NCO in the 17/21st Lancers, then worked in a factory for two years before becoming a stage manager and designer, joining Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop at Stratford East.
His radio play Prisoner and Escort, drawn from an occasion when he took a deserter to Shepton Mallet by train, was a success, and formed part of his theatrical debut, Cockade (Arts, 1963), a trilogy of short plays that won him the Evening Standard award for most promising playwright. He was praised for his ability to reproduce soldiers’ talk convincingly and yet with lyricism.
Wood gave up his day job in an office in Bristol to write full-time. Dingo (1967) was set partly in a prisoner-of-war camp in the North African desert; with its merry mockery of Churchill, Montgomery, Rommel and the Unknown Warrior, the play was refused a public licence for production at the National Theatre and could only be given to “private members” of the Royal Court’s English Stage Company.
Wood’s next controversial war epic, ‘H’; Being Monologues at Front of Burning Cities (Old Vic, 1969), was a dramatically static but spectacular pageant that guyed General
Havelock’s march across India to relieve Lucknow.
If Wood’s dialogue was more impressive and imaginative than his ability to construct a dramatic narrative, the shocking and sometimes nauseating impact of his futility-of-war plays carried a spectacular punch, and his designer’s eye for scenic effect often mitigated his tendency to sermonise.
Further explorations of the unromantic reality of working in film and theatre were Has “Washington” Legs? (Cottesloe, 1978), starring Albert Finney as the tyrannical director of a film about the American Revolution; Red Star (RSC, 1984) about a Russian actor (Richard Griffiths) who bears a disastrous resemblance to Stalin; and Across From the Garden of Allah (Duke of York’s, 1986), with Glenda Jackson as a disdainful British presence in Hollywood.
His most purely theatrical, exuberant and authentic comedy, Fill the Stage with Happy Hours (Piccadilly, 1967), made broad fun of a small-town rep of the sort he was raised in, and showed how people who spent their lives expressing fictitious emotions might have trouble dealing with their own. However, the show flopped on its transfer to London.
His first film credit, in 1965, was an adaptation of Ann Jellicoe’s The Knack … and How to Get It for Richard Lester, for whom he also co-wrote the Beatles caper Help!, released the same year, and How I Won the War (1967), which also featured a Beatle, John Lennon; Wood’s collaboration with Lester on Cuba (1979), starring Sean Connery, was less impressive.
His other films included adaptations of Spike Milligan’s The Bed Sitting Room (1969), Conan Doyle’s The Adventures of Gerard (1970) and Beryl Bainbridge’s An Awfully Big Adventure (1995); he also wrote the English dialogue for Fellini’s Satyricon (1969). For television he wrote the star-studded 1983 miniseries Wagner starring Richard Burton, the 1987 adaptation of Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals, and episodes of Sharpe, Inspector Morse and Kavanagh QC.
The last films he wrote were Iris (2001), with Judi Dench and Kate Winslet as Iris Murdoch, and an adaptation of Bernhard Schlink’s The Other Man (2008), starring Liam Neeson; both were further collaborations with Richard Eyre, who said of Wood: “There is no contemporary writer who has received so little of his deserved public acclaim.”
Wood, who described himself as “big, fat and scruffy”, once told The Sunday Telegraph: “I don’t really write, you know. I just sit down at a typewriter and sick it all up.” He claimed that he loved the Army as much as he hated it, and would happily spend his weekends exploring disused barrack squares: “Lovely places … so dramatic.”
Charles Wood was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1984. He married, in 1954, the actress Valerie Newman; they had a son and a daughter.
Charles Wood, born August 6 1932, died February 1 2020