Free Molly Fox's Birthday by Deirdre Madden Page A

him the night before the first preview as he berated the young actor who was playing the daughter. Had this happened early in rehearsal I would have got involved myself and tried to get him to back off. Now I realised that this was exactly what he wanted and that I would most likely have ended up arguing with the actor while Stuart withdrew, amused and in control. I kept my own counsel and studied him from the far side of the room. His accent, the expensive casual clothes he wore, the small leather-bound books in which he made notes while he worked and the black fountain pen with which he made them: all of this I held in disdain. What was he running away from? I asked myself. And what did he think he was running towards? I loathed social ambition as much as I approved of artistic ambition, of making the work as good as it could possibly be; and Stuart was a shameless social climber, always dropping names, always sucking up to the famous and powerful.
    By the time the first night came, I thought that if Summer with Lucy had been the glorious start to my career then The Yellow Roses might well mark its ignominious end. I couldn’t help hoping for a miracle, of thekind that does sometimes happen in the theatre. Was it possible that all the ill-will generated, all the bad feeling rife in the company, might by some strange means be converted into that good energy of which Molly had spoken, that it might transform and electrify the production?
    No. There was to be no miracle. The first night did not go well and we all got mauled in the press the following day, every last one of us: the cast, the set designer, the wardrobe people, the musicians; but the most scathing and dismissive responses were aimed at the writer and the director. I read the reviews the following morning with that strange, flesh-crawling sensation, that sudden brief flush of a chill, nauseous feeling that goes with being on the receiving end of a bad press. This tedious play … lacklustre production … yellow roses that have faded and lost their bloom … banality … inept … truly dreadful … It was like being mugged. By some weird means the critics divined the bad feeling between Stuart and myself and cranked it up. There’s no knowing what possessed Stuart Ferguson to make his contemporary directing debut with this lazy play, from a writer whose best work is long past . Lazy? Christ Almighty! Now I was ready to mug the mugger. I pushed the newspapers away from me and with that the phone rang.
    â€˜You must be bitterly disappointed.’ It was Molly. That marvellous voice was charged with all the power that those two words were capable of carrying, the bitterness, the disappointment, and yet to hear it made me feel better, as if she was able to articulate for me the pain that I could only feel. ‘Yes, Molly,’ I said, ‘I am.’
    Perhaps the most unfortunate thing of all was that my ignominy coincided exactly with her greatest triumph.She had opened in The Duchess of Malfi a fortnight earlier, and already it was being called a performance that would define the role for a generation. If my play had also been a success, how we would have celebrated together! If I had been as I was now, quietly engaged in writing a new work, I would have been energised and fired up by her success. Instead, we both had to face at the end of that week a newspaper column giving an overview of current theatrical offerings:
    Don’t Miss: Molly Fox is a magisterial Duchess of
    Malfi.
    Don’t Bother: The Yellow Roses: Tedious and turgid. 
    I realised immediately that this would be every bit as painful and unpleasant for Molly as it was for me. It gave, and then it took away. Our friendship and our close artistic collaboration on many of my plays were common knowledge. It was as if she was being used to humiliate me. Even Molly has had bad notices in her day, and if a performance of hers had been rubbished in the same breath as