It happened like this. When you spend years on a book, you hope that your publicist is going to help bring its existence to the attention of as many potential readers as possible. Publicists are custom-tooled to think outside the box. I probably should have guessed that promoting a book about musical performance would involve musical performance. Which is why I found myself nervously warming up outside a studio in Television Centre one weekday afternoon soon after publication. The producers of Simon Mayo’s programme on Radio FiveLive had agreed to have me on, "so long as he brings his horn". I felt the blood drain out of my entire body on reading that email. When I resumed my instrument, playing live in front of a million listeners was not part of the gameplan. But if there are units to shift, there is no alternative: you have to step up to the plate.
'The book, and therefore the play, is not just about me, and certainly not just about the horn'
The interview went quite well. For me, talking about the horn is a slam dunk. Then the moment came to stop talking and start playing. I’d been parked on a high stool, with a microphone placed near the bell of the horn on my right to pick up my matchless tone. (I jest. My horn-playing is, in case it's not already obvious, crap.) I took a deep breath and stumbled through a bit of slow Mozart. We resumed talking. For some reason the interview seemed to go on forever. He asked me to have another toot, which I did, more or less faultlessly. Things were going swimmingly. I’d been yakking on and off for about half an hour, past the news, by which time my defences were entirely lowered so that when Mayo asked me to have one more blow, I obliged. Even though I had nothing more prepared. The interview ended in flush-inducing, buttock-clenching embarrassment as I got halfway into a Mozart hunting tune and, basically, tumbled clean off my mount. Toes around the nation, I know for a fact, curled in genuine horror. I trudged disconsolately out of the studio and up Wood Lane. Never again. Ever.
Yeah, right. I then had to sell the book in the US (under the title A Devil to Play: long story to do with American aversion to double entendres) and found myself playing down the line to a studio in Los Angeles. And I have also twice recorded a snippet for the BBC. One is for the Radio Three series When Writers Play, in which professional writers tell of their amateur musical tussles. Others in the current series include AL Kennedy, Louise Doughty and Niall Ferguson. It is broadcast every night this week. The deal is you have to prove you can play, so my essay concludes with a rickety account of the tune from Mozart’s famous K495 Rondo.
But this whole thing started when I was obliged to provide the intro music for Book of the Week. And this was in fact the point at which things began to get properly weird. The abridgement was very well read by an actor called Nicholas Boulton, who made me sound posher that I like to think I do, but other than that, no complaints. I had never been read on the radio before, and I listened with a swelling heart to every broadcast, at 9.45 in the morning and then again at half past midnight. Once I even was lulled happily to sleep by the soporific sound of my own words.
A couple of weeks later I received an email from my agent advising me that she’d heard from someone else’s agent that an actor/playwright would like to talk. His name was Jonathan Guy Lewis. Although he’d done a lot of mainstream television drama, I didn’t recognise the name. He’d also had two plays produced, one at the Donmar, the other at the Menier Chocolate Factory. It turned out that he wanted to talk about doing a stage version of my book. Having spent a lifetime on the other side of the invisible barrier that divides the stage from the audience, and having additionally interviewed more or less every leading actor in the land, I cordially bit his hand off.'We shared the strange sensation of watching ourselves simultaneously morphing into stage characters'
Jonathan was also a lapsed horn player. I’d had 22 years off, he’d had 18. His wife, also an actress, had heard Book of the Week and suggested he listen, as my middle-aged yearning for musical fulfilment sounded pretty much like his too. We met and within five minutes had agreed that it must be a one-man play. Also, that vast swathes of the book needed to be stripped out to find the dramatic spine of the narrative.
Jonathan and I co-wrote the play in close collaboration with our director, Harry Burton. Five months after we first met, the play opened in a small disused pumphouse in a field by the sea at the Aldeburgh Festival. For the world premiere, I sat next to Dave Lee, the distinguished horn player who’d nursed me towards my performance and was a mainstay of the book. We shared the strange sensation of watching ourselves simultaneously morphing into stage characters. For the second performance the cello-playing Lady Di lookalike who is an unnamed fantasy figure in both book and play turned up unannounced. I hadn't clapped eyes on her for 25 years. This play was evidently going to do odd things.
Six months later, we had a three-week run at the Tristan Bates Theatre in central London. Some frontline reviewers from the nationals came along, said nice things, and we sold out. In February of this year we did another week at the Orange Tree in Richmond, to another sell-out. Jonathan has acted on the theatre’s in-the-round stage many times, and played the space with consummate skill. We’ve since taken it to some glorious places. I had an out-of-body experience standing on the stage of the Theatre Royal in Bath as we were teching the show, recalling that only a few weeks earlier I'd seen Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart here in Waiting for Godot. We also went to Frank Matcham’s Opera House in Buxton.This month the play is going on an autumn tour, starting at the Canterbury Festival, followed by a week at the Minerva Theatre in Chichester, a couple of shows at the Firestation in Windsor, then three weeks at the Hampstead Theatre. By the end of the run it’s possible that, with a following wind, the play will have been seen by more than 10,000 people.
I am acutely conscious that almost no one gets to see their life played out as a dramatic entertainment. Every time I watch it, I initially forget it's about me. But I get a jolt when about 10 minutes in my name is mentioned for the first time. “Jasper has been practising well,” says Jonathan, quoting one of my old school reports. Until then the play could have been about anyone. Suddenly it’s about me. Or, rather, “Jasper”. It’s a difficult one. Almost everything that happens in the play happened to me. There's been some discreet massaging, but very little of it is made up, apart from one fiery kick-up-the-arse speech given by Dave Lee. And yet I’ve always argued that the book, and therefore the play, is not just about me, and certainly not just about the horn. It’s meant to inspire recognition in anyone and everyone, because on a deeper level it’s about three things we all have felt: regret, obsession and humiliation.
In dramatic terms, the greatest of these is humiliation. And what the story eventually yields is redemption. Just as I finished my yearlong quest with a performance of the second and third movement of K447, Mozart’s third horn concerto, so the play must also conclude. It’s intended to be a bowel-clenchingly dramatic moment. Nothing we’ve seen thus far gives any hint that Jonathan as “Jasper” is going to be able to do it. Without giving away the ending, I’ll reveal only that he gets a very big round of applause at the end. At the Orange Tree he even got a standing ovation.
There were times, I will admit, when I have felt conflicted by the show’s success. The more curtain calls Jonathan takes on his own, the more applause and love and acclaim, a little voice in me sitting in the back row is saying, “Er, people, actually that’s my story you’re applauding. That’s in fact me you’re all cheering to the rafters.” And then I remind myself not to be a twit.
When Writers Play is on all this week at 11pm on Radio Three, and on the iPlayer for seven days afterwards. Listen to Jasper Rees's essay here.
Watch an extract from I Found My Horn. The play is on at the Canterbury Festival on Sunday 18 October, at the Minerva Theatre in Chichester from 27 to 31 October, at the Firestation in Windsor on 5 and 6 November and at Hampstead Theatre from 10 to 28 November.
