 Welcome to the British Library, welcome to our audience here in the flesh and to people watching from home. I'm Libby Purvis and tonight is a celebration of the life and work and legacy of the great theatre agent Peggy Ramsey. Some may have seen the play Peggy for you, lately at the Hampstead Theatre. Anyone who loves the theatre will be grateful to her, should be grateful to her for her mentoring and chiving and appreciating and supporting many of the greatest 20th century playwrights from Lakebourne to Orton to Ionesco. A lot of those names will come up tonight I think. Peggy Ramsey's archive of course is housed here at the British Library. Just before I introduce the panel some brief housekeeping notes, if you're here in person please switch phones off or to silent. If you're at home and you have questions which we would very much welcome, please submit them via the box below the video on your screen and we will do our best to get through them. The panel here now. We have an agent, a playwright, director, screenwriter and an actor director, all with their perspectives. Mel Kenyon was literary manager of the Royal Court and joined the agency Casarrotto Ramsey and Associates in 1992, therefore taking over many of Peggy's clients which is a list to make anybody gasp and seems to have been incredibly cool about it, aren't you? Well, I've been doing it for 30 years so you know. The excitement's worn off. Actually the excitement has not worn off, boy. This was 1992. Sir Christopher Hampton is of course playwright, screenwriter, translator, film director. He's lately given us marvellous translations of Florian Zella and of course his dangerous liaisons and the father versions won Oscars for screenplay. His career also, I believe, began under the representation of Peggy with your play. Your first play. When did you last see my mother? That's right, yes. And not least, Simon Callow. Tremendous actor who partly spurred by his friendship with Peggy also became a formidable writer. You may know his books about Charles Lawton and Orson Wells but the strangest, most formidable bit of writing I always think is a book called Love Is Where It Falls. It knocks me out every time. It's an account of his passionate friendship with Peggy Ramsay through the last 13 years of her life. When they met I think she was 70, you were 30. But the connection in meetings and letters is the most breathtaking account of a deep, passionate friendship that you will ever encounter. So we thought to set a scene, we would ask him to read a bit of the very beginning of that book, Love Is Where It Falls, where the young actor, a bit nervous, arrives in her office just to collect a copy of a play. It was a sunny summer's morning in 1980 when for the first time I ascended the spindly staircase festooned with posters of theatrical triumphs past that led to Margaret Ramsey Limited in Goodwin's court off St Martin's Lane in the centre of the west end of London. I had come to collect a copy of a play in which I had acted a couple of years before in the theatre in which I now hoped to persuade the BBC to do on television. Straight ahead of me at the top of three flights of stairs was the door with the agency's name on it under several layers of murky varnish. The last thing I expected or wanted to do was to talk to Peggy Ramsey herself but when I opened the door there she unmistakably was sitting at a desk or rather on one as she flicked through a script almost hitting the pages in her impatience to make them turn quicker. Her skirt was drifting up round the middle of her thighs to reveal knee-high stockings. Bearing me enter she looked up with an expression which seemed to mingle surprise amusement and challenge as if she'd been expecting me but had rather doubted I'd have the courage to come. It was a curiously sexy look. Hello I said I'm I know exactly who you are dear she said tell me if she continued as if resuming a conversation rather than beginning one do you think Akebourne will ever write a really good play? It's an interesting question I replied nervously slightly inhibited by the fact that I was at that moment appearing in a play by the author under discussion and that he was by far the most successful client of the woman asking the question you better come in she said calling over her shoulder for Tayon Pike to one of the young ladies in the office as she usherd me into what was evidently her private office adjusting and readjusting her skirt a flowery item beige silk and diaphanous she kicked off her shoes and seated herself at her desk while I settled down on the sofa oh that sofa she murmured mysteriously with many a nod and a smile as she absentmindedly combed her fine golden hair the room had an air of glamorous chaos about it half a workplace half Boudoir there were shelves and shelves of scripts right up to the ceiling their author's names boldly inscribed in red down the spine in one quick glance I saw Adamoth Bond Churchill Hampton Hare Rudkin there were books in great tottering piles awards both framed and in statuette form posters all of autumn nickels in Flemish Mortimer on Broadway plants everywhere trailing unchecked discarded knee high stockings scarves air brushes makeup bags mirrors and hats huge wide brimmed ribbon toting hats four or five of them draped over the furniture the air was hedderly fragrant confirming the rooms overpoweringly feminine aura is it that's enough or or did you want me to go on the bit go on it go on a little bit well I just go on one tiny bit more so in the midst of it all was Peggy clearly the source of both the glamour and the chaos she was now answering the telephone in a startlingly salty manner where they'll just have to tell them to fuck off dear she was saying to one corner I shall tell Merrick that we must have a million to another but your place no good dear she cried to a third informing me in an entirely audible aside it's boat I'm telling him his place no good and informing him I've got Simon Callow here and I'm telling him your place no good whatever the response was it made her chuckle richly well it isn't dear is it there were more calls all rapidly dispatched to my astonishment she seemed to think that talking to me and even more surprising listening to me was more important than the day-to-day business of running the most successful play agency in the country perhaps the world she dismissed that in a phrase the word agent she said is the most disgusting word in the English language poor Mel the woman who took over I actually agree with her I have never said when anybody says what you do I've never said I'm an agent I say I look after writers and directors are they say you're an agent so you it's quite a lot to live up to in terms of image and underwear thread I don't think our dress sense is at all I'm just glancing up yeah I'm not a purple girl but um yes I've often wondered if we'd actually have got on I think we we share some things in common but she didn't really like other women no so um the only thing that the only reason she might have liked me is I'm actually gay so I wouldn't have competed for any of the men that she rather who might have got on I can't quite tell but she did tell carol church or what women couldn't write at which point so Christopher over your your years with with Peggy does at all that description ring true does that feel entirely entirely um I was very very young when I first met her I'd written this play called when did you last see my mother and it had been put on by undergraduates at Oxford and and in those days miraculously the newspapers used to come and give you reviews even if you were you know an amateur Al's production so so there was a question of you know having an agent and I was forwarded to the general manager of the Oxford Playhouse very nice woman called Liz Sweeting and she said there's only one agent in the country worth talking to and that's Peggy Ramsey and I'll I'm happy to send your play to her so fine so a couple of weeks went by I was a student at New College Oxford I had a ground floor room there's a nice day I was sitting in the window and one of those chaps in Bola hats came across the quad and said are you Hampton I said yes he said phone call for you now this was not their job was to traipse around the college finding undergraduates to never been known so somebody of well first of all I thought somebody had died in my family but then it became clear that somebody intense forcefulness had ordered this to go and find me which he did so I went on the phone she said I like your play I said oh good that's that's I'm delighted she said come to London tomorrow I said well I I think there's a lecture on Baudelaire she said fuck Baudelaire get on the train I expect to see you at about 11 so I then walked up the stairs exactly as Simon described them and was shown in and was told about the famous sofa and it was it was extraordinary she was extraordinary she picked up the phone shouted at people and literally while I was there she rang up William Gaskell at the Royal Court and sort of more or less ordered him to put my play on and anyway it was a marvellous conversation she was she was her mind was so wide ranging at a certain point she she had there was a big handbag she always had huge handbags she lent over sideways and plunged her arm into the handbag came up with a handful of five pound notes and said there you are dear I said well uh it's all right I've got a day return she said she said well done dear you passed the test we want to we want to get at something of that great personality and one of the ways is really I always think through Simon's book because she took to you I mean you were 30 and not yet famous she was 70 and very famous and you turn up in her office like that and from that moment she just seems to have taken to you in a and you took to each you took you took to each other you somehow kind of needed each other it's an extraordinary friendship to read about well it was just extraordinary to realise that it was happening to me I mean we have this extraordinary encounter here which I think every encounter with Peggy was extraordinary for anyone um because she was so surprising all the time but of course it didn't it didn't immediately happen but but after a very short space of time I suddenly realised that this was a passion had ignited in her and I never had an experience of that I'd had plenty of affairs relationships and things like that but to be exposed to that like blast of emotion and intensity that was really quite something but I I did as you say find that I had a capacity to answer it to to to rise to it and so in a sense I sort of not really wittingly but inevitably found the flames and she and it ranged for well many years and I perhaps never really ever did die out the exchange of letters quite extraordinary with I mean they're their lovers letters but you weren't lovers because you were gay and she was she was 70 and so on but but they are absolutely that passion I've there's one phrase which I I sort of knocks you back in the book where you have read because she was very generous in her appreciation of talent I think that's obviously something Mel agents have to be don't they they have to well the good ones are they have to be able to reach out and and sort of love somebody for what they do like a good like a very good you know a good writer or critic maybe does you know sort of I just you know I want I need you I love you um but you read the Shakespeare Sonnets and she's only senses missing your reading has your performance has scorched me like a forest fire and I am finding it hard to recover that's extraordinary isn't it that that's not the kind of message that no young chap gets from from someone who isn't even his agent indeed indeed um but I I I I I I remember it felt like being in an opera actually where suddenly this huge phrase of extraordinary intensity and urgency would emerge from her and I'd sort of join in as if it was a duet you know and rise it was La Bohème or it was Tosco or something and and um you had of course been an opera singer yes absolutely Carl Rosa touring company yeah and as I told you the other day yeah I I uh once said to her what were you like Peggy what were you like as an opera singer she said well there I wasn't very good but I was very loud Simon were you frightened were you frightened at any point when it started you never felt frightened never never no I I I grew up entirely surrounded by women immensely strong women of intensely forceful personalities so in a way it was a bit like coming home being yes a bit like that you know and uh because I was the also the only child the male and a male child at that there was a special kind of energy around me sometimes appalled energy and and I was you know had to be you know bottled up somehow or or or very often most often and encouraging energy and but there are these small panics in the book there are these small panics because I mean there's you have partners you have yeah well that's the the fact there's the tragedy of Aziz happens through through the book yes I but she then has to be she's got to get a grip on him as well and meet him and be there and be part of your total life and this is that's many got very very difficult and and that that of course applied to the writers as well because as you said Mel it is and you both said it love I mean she fell in love with the writer and the writer's writing and as a sort of gestalt and and so with me um it I was indeed very deeply in love actually with it with a young man a rather exotic young man um and Peggy was enormously disturbed by that fact but at the same time sought to kind of absorb him as well and then know finding that he was a student of film at Tobackensfield uh she then suddenly started I'll you know well I'll meet I'll introduce you to Sam him to Sam Spiegel and well I'm well I'm maybe not absolutely the best thing to do but but but but it was and it was on the brink of destructive because she just didn't think that he was worthy of me in the terms in which she thought of love that is to say it wasn't oceanic as it was with her and yet the constructive side which we was talking it's a crystal about as well and and to Mel is um I mean I I did notice the bit where you have done your first attempt at writing something you've written a piece for the evening standard and Peggy goes over it now because she is basically in charge of you in her head and changes things absolutely brilliantly and correctly but then does a rather wrong sentimental sentence at the end which they eventually cut and you realise that she was a maker of writers but not a writer although as you said her letters are extraordinary as even as literature I mean they're fantastic in that little collection we put together from the collection here at the British Library uh she I mean it's your phrase about the scorched like a etc I mean it she she was remarkable but but what was particularly memorable about that occasion is she did this is this is her famous gesture I tried to get Tamsen to do this in the play but she she couldn't find a way of balancing all the props but she'd she'd take her glasses off to read you see and she'd go like this with her hands on that the the the arm or whatever you call that of the of the and then read like this and so she was reading this thing I don't know this is this piece for the evening standard and she said did you mean it to be so boring yes exactly because tell me about as a writer working with her I mean writers do not like usually being pushed about and things change and edited how was that for you well I mean I you know it was no good being a client of Peggy's and not wanting to be you know projecting to being pushed about she would ring at 8 30 in the morning and say are you working sometimes the phone would ring and you'd pick it up and there'd be a terrible silence then she'd say isn't Keith am I ringing you why are you ringing me so you never knew what was gonna come next but the the moment of greatest fear was when you handed your new play to her because um you know if she didn't like it I think it's fair to say she told you no uncertain terms and and so it was always a it was you know and I was you know I was very lucky because she tended mostly to like them and and that was there was a huge relief but occasionally you brought right we should I wrote a television play once and she didn't really like the whole idea of television or film and wondered why anybody bothered with them but anyway she read this television play it was an original television play rang me up and said well this isn't this is really not very good dear I said oh I did a lot of research and I I feel it's I haven't quite you know made it absorbed all of that but I I think basically it's a it's a basically an interesting idea she said it is not an interesting assignment gives us near the end a finding after her death her commonplace book where she'd written little poems and notes on notes on Freud and Jung and Sartre from quotations about how a drama works and Aristotle's Poetics and the the way to speed the story on and don't tell show and let it happen on stage I mean absolute goldmine of principles and ideas and understanding of what drama yes in what you discovered from that was that she didn't it didn't she didn't leap fully formed as a as a critic of of drama she had really worked hard at it because remember she'd been an actress then she'd been a manager of a theatre and which often did new plays the questers and and she was she she knew that she wasn't an actress she knew that she wasn't a singer and yet she was profoundly engaged with drama and it turned out she was advising people kind of spontaneously managers about plays that they might put on she would say Edward Sutrow she would say do do that play dear that's the one to do people began to see her judgment was extraordinarily good and she was no respecter of reputations so so she was interested in a play more interested in a play by a new writer because it was that same thing she she wanted to feel the the gust of passion something new and and and the more subversive it was the happier she would be about it yes we should sketch mill what it is a play agent does because you know you tend to something oh yes finds a good play you know a literary agent finds a novel likes a novel sells it to a publisher and it's kind of over you know the publisher does it and the agent gets some money but it's you have to negotiate um these and terms and then check up the plays working and and then deal with producers deal with theatres i mean that that's all part of it isn't it you're you're like an octopus you kind of do everything i mean and also i think i i think um i think i mean i don't know Christopher and Simon may completely disagree i think there's a very lovely i mean we call ourselves this reagents even though actually we're playwrights agents but there's a very lovely relationship that you can forge together so it is like falling in love i always i've always said to the younger you know younger agents who are coming through i said you know you don't when they kind of go oh i quite like this play i think well don't take them on darling you've got to fall in love you've got to meet them you so and often i think the spirit of the work so when you first read a work and remember you haven't met somebody so you read a playwright of 22 often i responded to the spirit of the work so you obviously respond to the writing itself or whether they've got a dramatic instinct and all of those sorts of things but there's something that feeds the work and you can feel plays if you really got used to reading them and you sense it you can feel a play so often when you fall in love with the play you are going to fall in love in some extraordinary way with the person who walks through the door and it can cement itself in 30 seconds you think oh well there we're going to spend the next to know which producer which director might possibly love it as much then the chemistry starts so then um when you're really good at it i kind of think you're like an alchemist you kind of start putting the ingredients together so um uh and you do that you know obviously as playwrights become increasingly well established they've then forged those relationships themselves and some of that falls away as they get um more and more established but when they're little you're putting them in the right place with the right people at the right time right right up the other end and i mean i don't know so Christopher you won't have happened to you um because you're still firing on all cylinders but there's a terrifying moment in the play and it also it turns up in the book where one of her one of her clients dies as a playwright and she really doesn't care at all because he wasn't doing any more good work that that was it he was he was finished darling um he was gone yes i i i this is in Alan Plater's play uh and i i think it was a misunderstanding um because i remember when it was only about a year after i joined her um Joe Walton was murdered by his friend Kenneth Halliwell and uh and he you know was a great to you know Peggy had to go and identify the body and bodies and everything and she appeared to be quite extraordinarily callous at that point she i remember being very shocked about a week after this happened when she said to me well dear he was starting to repeat himself Joe i don't think he would have got any better uh i think he would have just written the same play over and over again um and it it's somewhere along the saying that it became clear to me that she was this was her way of dealing with grief that she was profoundly upset and the only way to sort of deal with it was to was to say well i mean doesn't really matter or you know he's done here and i think that was you know people knew you know she said it to everybody so people knew about that and i think that was the misunderstanding in the in the play which i think otherwise is is often very accurate about her but i i think she she was not in any in any sense unfeeling if she was ever unfeeling it was only to protect herself from the gael force of her of her actual feeling so right yes i think that's absolutely true of course there's always a saying that that writer's a writer has to have a chip of ice somewhere yes you know has and i suppose an agent to some extent has to as well i mean there's going to come a point with some writers when you're going to have to say not this time as i mean so i i i kind of um and i hope i haven't misremembered this because i haven't read the letters for a while but i remember reading one of the letters and you know she lamented being an agent because actually emotionally you do have a big family you know you have a big family of a lot of people that you invest a lot of time and energy in and if you do it properly you you love them and it's exhausting so i think um you know i think not that you have a chip of ice but there are times where you have to protect yourself against you can find yourself with few emotional reserves left and also i think you can find yourself having no personal life at all because you are so completely fulfilled and engaged by what's going on around you that actually you can easily neglect your personal life unless you really make the effort not to is quite an extraordinarily all-encompassing job then you see the so fascinatingly into it comes a friendship there may have been earlier similar ones i don't know but friendships like the one the one with simon where i mean you're sitting drinking together into the night um and and having strange picnics on gardens and so on and then she's up working early she's back in the office early in the morning and everything's going on she she didn't spare herself did she at any at any stage it doesn't seem to me she you know she had the personal relationship the friendship the i you know this exciting conversation we're having we're absolutely getting there you know and then all this work to do i mean this is this is a powerhouse of yeah almost hysterical energy uh oh i wouldn't call it hysterical no that i would not have said of her uh but it was it was a powerhouse no question about that i don't think she believed much in sleeping did she no she didn't and she always went sleep with a with a play in her hand yeah and um she in addition to what you've just said during you know the time we she and i knew each other uh not only would she have these passionate conversations drink with me blah blah blah but then at 6 30 in the morning she'd leave a little offering for me on the doorstep of uh it might be a basket of eggs or um some perfume or something or a book or something extraordinary we were exquisitely wrapped up with a with a note of great great passion and then she walked into work every day she lived in Earlscourt she walked into work every day barefoot because it's very extraordinary because she'd suffered very badly from bunions and so she would take off her shoes and just march down the streets down down the night bridge and on to the office in um a Goodwin's court she and and when she got cancer of the breast she didn't stop working at all as far as i know she was having chemotherapy she was having uh all sorts of drugs uh to counter it and uh she still came into work i think every single day walked into work every day so there was just this titanic discipline in the woman as well but i don't tell me christopher you didn't you didn't get strange presents left on your step or anything did you um no i did not maybe the playwright didn't just no i was the one when she finally got to the office she then would you know i was the one she then rang up and rated for still being fed uh so it's slightly different but she was very very devoted i think and it's interesting how she made a tremendous effort to be to be to be fascinated with all aspects of life but in but but not always successfully she used to she used to come and stay my wife and i bought her a quite a sort of rect a rectory in oxfordshire and she used to come for the weekend and we had we just had our first child who was in her high chair and Peggy would sort of stare mysteriously say things like do you feed him fish dear say no Peggy it's a girl and she's on still on she's not on solids yet not solids oh and then she would think about this woman and she's do bring him up on Sprott it was a completely baffling question until still you thought about it for five minutes and worked out that she meant Spock and um yeah so she was not so as it were ordinary life had kind of passed away she was baffled by the phenomenon of people getting married anyway what he would get married for dear uh and famously said uh was some one of her clients was going to New York for the Tony's and mentioned to Peggy that he was taking his wife and she said what are you doing that for dear it's like taking a ham sandwich to a banquet but there's there's something which which comes out in all all accounts of her um which is is extraordinary is that that business that yes maybe the minutiae of life and baby care and sort of stuff like that just meant nothing to her but she something which any of us who get emotional in theatres will recognise this feeling that you have to embrace life with all the tragedy and all the harshness and all the horribleness and all the death and all the humiliation and disappointment if you were ever to feel any joy you know and that that felt essential theatre to me yeah and and i think you know that it was a part of the tragic view of life she she really there was there was a dark thread of despair in Peggy which was the exact counter balance of the of this passion for the new that she loved the new that was you know that's why she loved Jagadeth so much because he was always looking for what is new and that that exhilarated her so much and she and she had lots of famous phrases about that that that that new art new art of any quality is always shocking and seems ugly yes ugly that's the word she used yes it was and like the right of spring blah blah and and and she she uh that to feel herself in the presence of something new and and dangerous and difficult and ugly was very very exciting to her but also she's absolutely right i mean you know as we go into a increasingly increasingly kind of world where everybody has to feel and nobody wants to feel any discomfort i mean it's very aware that art can't flourish under these circumstances and the best work is is does make you feel dain it does feel dangerous the first time or unexpected or shocking the first time you read it and it should i mean art should discomfort but can you do you a little as an agent because you're doing the job that she was doing you see and you're such a different personality from everything i can see well you know i'm just met today it's not wearing my purple dress today but i haven't had my hair done do you find when you read or in fact when you see plays even if you've done all that nitty gritty of the money and the producer and the the rows and the agents in the contrast do you dig deep i mean do you do you find yourself moved sort of in a oh yes a really dangerous personal way i mean terrifyingly i'm terrifyingly emotional yes i it's um and it's quite it's quite extraordinary and sometimes very unexpected because also you don't really want to be you know sitting in those obvious door seats crying your eyes out um as the agent but you might find yourself doing that or or you um i've perfected a wolf whistle because sometimes i'm terribly over excited so there's nothing for it but a good wolf whistle um uh and it always gets the audience on their feet it's extraordinary um it's like you know a whistle to a dog um so it's uh i was once told off by Ian Rixon for being over enthusiastic at my own client's play um which i thought was a bit rich uh yeah no it's it's it's and also remember that you may well have read the piece of work 18 months before and may even have been the first person who's read it other than probably a lover and a mother right and so you've lived with this thing but you've lived with your perception of this thing and so there's nothing more exhilarating than um because you have to imagine everything in 3d you have to you can tell for example if a playwright only hears the words you can you know very well if a playwright sees you know all those sorts of things because you have to imagine it fully you have to play the rhythms you do the accents i'm very good at accents in my head you do all those things and then you see it fully realised and there's nothing more exhilarating and and it's very exhilarating if actually you have succeeded in your in the you know while reading it to yourself to kind of have fully realised it in your imagination and then you see it on stage and then it's extraordinary so you never lose that sense of wonder i mean it's your church it's your religion it's extraordinary so Christopher how what about you because you've i mean you have translated and adapted plays of enormous i mean the father you know sort of knocked everybody sideways and the mother as well these florenzela plays and other plays do you how do you deal with the emotion of it you know when it's a job and it has to be done and has to be done right i mean is that is that a sort of a question of digging around stopping yourself being emotional you have to feel everything as intensely as you can but of course you have to kind of clock off at a certain point because otherwise you'd be consumed by it but but i think i think the energy and the emotion that you feel when you're writing or translating a masterpiece of some sort that's that's what you do that's sort of what you do it for i suppose well that's what you're addicted to but then one you know flowbath said you have to pour all your poison and good and bad feelings and everything you know your emotions into a piece of work so so as you're able to lead as calm a life as possible yes which i've always thought you know i've always tried you tried to live by but you need to be scorched don't you Simon i mean actors i mean you talk to actors and opera singers always fascinating talking to opera singers about how much can they allow themselves to feel at a particular moment and that happens to actors as well doesn't it how how deep you're going into this because you know you've got to speak the lines and get off the stage at the right time well as an actor what happens a lot is when you're working on the play either in rehearsal or away from the rehearsal room you can become completely overtaken by the emotion i mean which is a rather wonderful experience but in in fact that emotion rather overwhelms the play so it's it's it has to be contained and has to be refined and you have to be able to access it but but certainly there's a moment for me when i read a part that i'm that i've been excited by and start to learn it particularly as you start to learn it and it becomes internal uh then then you can get a little bit out of control the idea of peggy yes i mean as i say the the book before we go to the the floor i should mention again the the book love is where it falls is is the most extraordinary account of a great love a loving passionate relationship which is also a trap i mean you're trapped and you want to be trapped i mean that that's how it is isn't it and oh i didn't really feel trapped by it but it is i mean yes it was it's like addictive but but um it of course peggy started to get older and visibly older as the relationship went on and she then took much more comfort in because she too had a relationship you see with with an actor ex actor called bill rodderick who was a a really old style hail fella well met kind of solid chap and had been very sexy in his day it was the rodderick brothers were known of twins were were known as you know ladies men and all of that kind of thing and they peggy had had a very passionate affair with bill and then it had sort of died and she'd sent him off to America as Paul Schofield's understudy in um man for all seasons and then he took over the part of Thomas Moore on the tour and the American tour and then he came back to England and peggy always expressed it as she'd sort of felt pity on him as if he was sort of an animal like a dog or something that she brought into the house and and and but she didn't really acknowledge him publicly but as she got older she started to do so much more and i know they had evenings quiet evenings together which was a very un peggy idea and they lived they had a house in Brighton as well where they went every weekend but it that became very tender and then bill died pre-deceased her and she said that remarkable thing to uh David Hare she said um it was she was already you know she the old times was beginning to to creep up on her but but she said um i suppose dying for dying and um just she'd watched bill um Schofield and she she died very um gracefully we weren't there i mean David and I managed tipped off and we were around and so we went immediately after she died we didn't actually see her die but but but but but she had she did face it as she prescribed she just took it on board you know that same just take embrace life in everything but I love I love another description I was quoting from your book before we go to the floor that next to Peggy sometimes everyone seemed less less passionate less perceptive less brilliant less honest less absolute and I thought right I'm never going to be careful how I talk to anyone again I'm going to tell them everything I feel about them here and now be very afraid um let's see if there's anybody here would like to come up with the first question yes sir I think they're going to bring your microphone so everyone at home can hear as well I'll be interested in hearing a little bit more about the business side of things from the point of view that you get to the top of any profession with a huge amount of personal qualities of the positive side but there also has to be a certain ruthlessness ambition I mean what was it what was it like for the playwrights she didn't like or the agents she had to compete with yeah well I just like to say something because because we will answer that better than I do in in those terms but what something I was was almost perfectly paradoxical about Peggy with this pure and and and and and Greek sense of the essence of things and and and living to the absolute hilt and so on was that she she adored making money she just loved it and she was very very good at it she prided herself on her genius at the roulette wheel and I saw that in action she really just put it on that dear I'm never wrong and and and and it was indeed she was right we made a few bob out of that and she she had um she was brilliant at knowing which shares to buy and she bought shares in Holland and Barrett and rejoiced in the you know the acceptance of the world's increasing interest in the products of Holland and Barrett and and and she um and she loved doing deals she was absolutely brilliant at it even though a disapproving of the amount of money that her authors were about to earn in their terms she loved and she pushed them higher and higher and higher and she had this sort of combination of of of financial acumen and absolute moral force weird combination that made most of the people she dealt with buckle completely and they they gave in let's let's come back the question of what about the playwrights who she who she didn't help up the ladder I don't know what happened I think they finally got the message and slipped away to other agents I don't really know what the answer to that is but she was there's a one of my favorite stories about her is that there's a um uh a writer called Larry Cramon American writer who had begun as a film producer and he made a he produced a film of women in love that Ken Russell made and it was written there was a script written by David Mercer one of her writers that she particularly was fond of but at a certain point it was decided that by Larry that he would write the script himself himself and so David was let go but there was an outstanding amount of money which was had not been paid so Peggy invited Larry Cramer to lunch uh on a Friday and she was extremely uh you know open and friendly with him and she said come back to the officer a cup of coffee dear and so uh he she he did and uh she said uh I'll make the sit down I'll make the coffee myself and left the room at which point you heard the key turning in the lock and she said um Larry dear I hope you've brought your checkbook with you and he said well I I mean she said well the thing is I'm going to brighten and if you want to you know you can spend the weekend in my office if you want to otherwise just slide the check under the door down um which he did and then a few years later when he became a playwright of course the first thing he wanted was to make Peggy his agent good tip there isn't it yes yes unfortunately nobody does anything by check anymore but that was um I mean you asked about ruthlessness I don't think um necessarily there's a ruthlessness but I do think um a lot of uh writers who've had very successful careers are very good at helping an agent curate their career so that there's a lot of um and it's down to hard work I mean a lot of it's you know there's an enormous amount of talent needed there's also hard work and some writers don't know how to manage their own talent and those are the ones often that fall by the wayside they just cannot manage their own talent so they don't know how best to and when I say exploited I don't mean exploited in a financial sort of way they just don't know how to preserve it and they don't know how to manage it and no person as an agent you can help nurture and hold them in a safe place but actually unless they also have the ability to manage their own talent and realize it you can't do anything you cannot make so as with books as with anything else you may always get a one hit wonder you know the old thing that everyone's got a book in them but there might only be the one yeah and there's something about feeding your intellect and your own spiritual nourishment there's all sorts of things and I don't mean you know going to yoga classes or doing any of that it's a very instinctive thing how to protect your talent the lovely story has just come to us from somebody uh watching online Sarah uh who says I was taken to Peggy's office as a child I was waiting outside while my dad James Saunders was in her office there was so much shouting I thought something terrible was happening to him later he used to say when someone asked him why he didn't change his agent how could I we like trying to change your mother there's another question coming up here from Nicholas James can you share with us how Peggy came to work with the literary agent Tom Earhard Tom Earhard yes Earhard yes well yes yes I think he Tom arrived about this sort of late 60s about the same time that I did and he had been working for he was an American who had been working for Peter Bridge the theatrical producer and somehow Peggy stole him what stole him stole him yes she absolutely nicked him and he was completely the opposite of Peggy so they were a wonderful couple because he was absolutely calm collected new and he was enormously knowledgeable one of his the things that he knew about was which theatre in Bratislava was the better theatre to serve you I mean he just knew everything and you know he ran the Tennessee Williams estate and he was unflappable he went to the theater every single night and on his holidays he went abroad and went to the theater every single night and so where Peggy was a sort of whirlwind dervish he knew his his fund of knowledge was absolutely uh unparallel he knew more about the the the mechanics of the theater than than anybody have ever met I mean Tom I've worked with Tom for a long time and Tom was quite extraordinary because by the time I was working I mean he was the person who gave me my job but um he at the older he got um I used to go to the theater with him and he was a big man he was about six foot three six foot four child and and not skinny not that but not skinny anyway he'd sit and you know you'd see this big head lol and you're saying oh Jesus fucking hell Tom's falling asleep again but he would absorb the work by Osmosis so you end of play and he'd go oh I didn't I didn't like that girl in act two and you think he was asleep in act two and he knew he he so he he got so used to going to the theater he could almost smell what was going on on stage he never actually fell asleep it was quite extraordinary I don't know how he did to this day I don't know so he was resting while watching and absorbing another part of the brain wonderful yes point there microphone's just coming your way sir at least three very good actresses have played her on the stage and on the screen um I'm certainly not asking you to make any comparisons but when you saw any of the performances for those um that that knew her was there any particular aspect where you felt a real sense of recognition or something that really caught your attention well I could answer that a bit because in the case of Maureen Lipman who was the first person to do Peggy for you um rather as you know Maureen was married to Jack Rosenthal the playwright whom Peggy represented but but she was a wife and therefore on the whole kept at arm's length and so when she was cast in the part she took me to lunch and said can you sort of really describe Peggy to me and I sort of said well I did and and then because and and I said her gestures were extremely um original to her a certain way of using her hands her tendency to lie out in rather kind of exotic odaliske like flapping her dress and all the rest of it to cool her nether regions and um and she um so Maureen said well I can't possibly do any of that I mean I'll just have to do it you know the way I read it so I said well fine go ahead but actually curious enough when Maureen did it she really did inhabit Peggy's um physical life remarkably and then Tamsen went through a similar sort of process and and they both found her physical life very very very well indeed but the play didn't allow them fully to to to show what Peggy was but then there's the movie well now she the topic of conversation about a year before the movie was made was who was going to play me yeah uh she was fascinated by this she'd ring up and say they're suggesting coral brown dear coral brown never heard of it and so as the different actresses were considered she would you know be cheered up or all depressed uh in the end of course it was Vanessa redgrave was of course about a foot tall of Peggy and not not like her in any any physical way at all and Peggy was absolutely delighted but but by the by the time that the again Alzheimer's has started to to to invade her I had directed Vanessa in Ballad o the Saad Café and I'd been away from Peggy therefore for six months that was the longest that I ever was away from and we had a little you know reunion uh uh lunch at um cheekies the old cheekies before Jeremy King and so on took it over and um she said to me uh uh I told her about the film and uh who who were the actors and I said who they were and I said Vanessa and she said Vanessa didn't I play her once and I said no no no she played you oh and I said no no no she missed you by a mile she said what do you mean I said well she played you like an angel of goodness and light she said has she ever met me anymore on the floor there because we have well yes hi good evening um I've read a little bit about um the sense that Peggy became sometimes disappointed with some of her clients and I'm thinking about Robert Bolton particular where they were potentially lured away to the evils and great riches of television or film and to lesser extent television don't know if you'd care to comment on on that in relation to Robert or other clients uh well I certainly I mean the thing was about about films Peggy knew that they were a source of enormous um money uh but she didn't really approve of them or like them and she was very upset about Robert Bolton having abandoned the theatre completely and uh you know taken to writing these films uh and the only um I was with her for 25 years from the time I first met her to the time she died and the only serious row we ever had was when I said I would like to take an agent in Los Angeles to look after uh film to get me film work um and she said well if that's what you're gonna weigh I mean go and I said no no you don't understand I there's a difference between us you don't like films I really do like films and I would like to be able to to write to write them in in in not in opposition to or instead of but in tandem with writing plays and so what doesn't it make sense for me to to have somebody who's really you know can deal with the film side of things where uh and take those anxieties of you where you know because all you feel is disapproval about it and eventually we sorted it out and I did get an agent in Los Angeles um what was a slight mishap was that the agent in Los Angeles was an English woman uh and therefore fell into two categories that uh Peggy disapproved so so that so it was never quite you know it was never quite resolved but she really she really did feel personally afflicted by by the sort of biography or life trajectory of Robert Bold and and tended tended to use him as a I mean I remember being in in her office once when somebody called from a theatre in Washington um to to talk to about doing a play I think called Brother and Sister by by Robert Bold anyway something like that and she said it's an extraordinary thing about that play dear to this producer from Washington she said um I mean Robert had written it and rewritten it and rewritten it and it just gets worse so I don't know what which version you're planning to do but none of them are any good so the man was obviously baffled because he'd rung up to make an offer on this play she said I'm sitting here with a young writer I've written a play called Total Eclipse why didn't you do that instead it was very very shocked I said Peggy you mustn't do that don't do that anyway they did do Total Eclipse what do you think it would be fair to say that for everything we we've heard about Peggy and her being an absolute true believer as many of us are at the live stage live performance people breathing the same air it's something that matters but she would feel a bit thwarted by the way the theatre is today and the way that agents have to be today because you really have to be multi-media to a great extent don't you if your clients are going to I mean I'm by and large by by and large um no my play writes right for the theatre and some of them have made a small fortune I have to say I mean uh they dip a couple of them dip their toe in the film and tv pond but a lot of them don't but it's often I mean the perception is that it's I mean I know one one young writer who's written one lovely play that was really good and it got produced and it was well thought of and Michael Frane came to see it and said oh that was the best first play he'd seen for ages she has not written anymore is working now in comedy script writers rooms because because of the sense of security I mean that that does happen doesn't it I mean it does but it also depends on your agent so that if you have no interest in the theatre and a lot of agents do don't but if somebody like this has written a play which didn't actually have there was no agent involved you know it was a theatre simply took it up did it uh you know so I mean what what I mean surely that this does happen I mean this must happen to some people who feel I can make some money sort of hacking away in a writer's room yes although I think I mean it's changed in the last two and a half year three years it's it's become ridiculous with the esfons which are you know the netflixes and the apples of this world it's it's I mean it's so much shit that out there it's unbelievable and who wants to add to that shit but um so you know it also depends it really does depend on your mindset so you know if a young writer comes in and they've written a play and they walk in and they want representation and actually what they want to do is write for telly I won't represent them because that's not where my passion lies so the fact and I also think there's a kind of consolidation of the talent and the voice which are if they go into series tv too early actually you you you haven't you haven't found your you may not have fully found your voice so actually the only the only the danger of going into into series tv too early I um you go into a kind of home you they want to homogenize your talent rather than celebrate its uniqueness is that you do lose your voice so I have had one client who's actually terribly successful in tv but um uh and he went into it very young and I doubt very much whether he could write a stage play that would be worthwhile staging now what about just one one other question really what about plays that are just the wrong time you know you are sometimes any ages and actors as well must suddenly come along and think oh you know I love this but it's so not going to get produced now yes and some some you fall in love with there was um a playwright called Robert Holman and he wrote a beautiful play called Jonah and Otto it took me four and a half years to get it on and you just can't if you so that's the other thing about it if you really believe in theatre and if you really believe in writing talent there can't be any cynicism because you are going to have to go through you may have to go through through some very barren times with writers not all of them can have an extraordinary stellar career so unless you actually love them and actually love their work you can't sustain them in the bad years and so you have to you have to coming right back around to Peggy aren't we yeah I think the most perhaps the most unusual thing about Peggy in the sense of her being an agent was that I think she really believed that the only way to make money was to have no interest in it whatsoever and then it sort of came yeah but if you went out looking for it um then you were somehow betraying your calling you you know of course of course my writers have to live live live should live as well as they possibly can but I don't you know she she absolutely wouldn't if there was a hint of of anybody working for money you know she got upset and that was a great lesson for all of us but but that was the the complication with Bolt yes that she had really engineered his success the financial success in films and so of course he became a bit addicted to the life that that gave him and so so and she felt a little bit guilty about that Christopher did that did that bunch of fivors sort of ever happen to people did did she ever help people out oh yes oh exactly incredibly gentle amazing you had to stop her from I mean I remember once I did borrow some money from her because I just ran out you know as one has happened in this career and I borrowed some money from her and then three or four years later I paid it back and she said she was most surprised because I think she lent her money to all her writers and didn't often or get it back if the roof fell in then she'd just paid for it yeah extraordinary but that was but that that was absolutely that something completely separate from her work as an agent that was just her compassion as a person she just wrote the check and never thought of it again but I also wonder because I feel this slightly um I I I wonder whether her to stay for film and tv is is there's a kind of pricing that goes on so that you know they'll come back to your they'll come out when you're doing a negotiation and say by the writer who's obviously never written a screenplay for hollywood before so what's his hollywood quote and um and actually it is like there are prices there are kind of stickers on the front of various writers heads and they're worth so and so and they're worth so and so so it's all about the extrinsic value it's not about the intrinsic value of the work and I think that went against everything she held dear and I completely understand it um and also it doesn't necessarily lead to good writing because if you're paid a million dollars to write the first draft of the screenplay and it's shipped but you walked away with your million dollars it doesn't matter if you don't get to write the second draft and the third draft and get to see the film made you've walked away with a million dollars so in a funny sort of way it's anti creative you know that kind of marketplace mentality I think so I can understand why it hurt her she also was very very generous in investing in plays but her principle was that she would only invest in plays that she thought would lose money she said you know if a play is going to run for a year and make money well they don't need my money uh but if a play is really worthwhile and I want people to see it I'll pay for it she was when was it your I forgot no was it Galileo you you were in something which she had put together you know she she'd put the whole thing together a total eclipse and then that was total eclipse wasn't it and and um then the music the music was going to cost too much so she oh no no that's restoration and that was in restoration where she slapped the money down basically and said but well Bond oh she was so angry with Edward Bond who always but um but but he wanted um he he decided that he no what it was was this that she knew that it had been a very difficult rehearsal period and by definition it would be because Edward was directing as well and so she said I want to pay for a party for the actors and Edward said no that is wrong give me that money because I need it for more music for the squad she was so angry with him about that but she did eventually give him the money and no party and it was all incredibly fraught and unpleasant we must wind up in a moment I just want to really ask the floor here do do we feel we've met Peggy Ramsay is anyone here who actually did no but we I feel I've I've met her more more personally than that that's the only last thing any of you would just want to put on the question you've seen a hand oh sorry I see a hand I don't know if I might be well I get the sense that she's actually quite shy you know this theatrical very theatrical but the thing of putting those little eggs on your step it's like someone who wants to um say hello and does it in a shy way and then run away I don't know is that wrong or what do you think it's a very counterintuitive word to to use about Peggy um but I'm not sure that you're wrong entirely there was a subtle a sort of occasional bashfulness about her but never I think in the sphere of playwriting flamboyant people sometimes are shy because putting on a great big costume and our flower dress on a hat and shouting at people she was very delicate in lots of ways she was and uh and she liked words like I mean a word of praise about a play for example would be demure it's that floating silk skirt again which meant that she liked it um uh so yeah she she was um she there were many um many many different qualities arrayed under that yes that was that was what she was clear patra like in that sense that there were you know a dozen Peggy's and she gave us all some astonishing evenings in theatres um we must come to an end now our time is technically up I think so thanks to all our panel Mel Kenyon Sir Christopher Hampton and Simon Callow uh thanks to the audience here at the British Library have come out tonight and to anyone who is watching from home or may do in the future um if you've enjoyed tonight's event please they say do explore other events within the programme at bl.uk it's the best website ever bl.uk very simple and if you want to view previous events you can find them all on the bl player um to learn more about the Peggy Ramsey archive and countless others they are available via the British Library reading rooms and again far more information always can be found on the website uh but thanks to everybody from me I've had a great evening uh apparently the bar is open so