‘I’m happy if you’re happy,’ said Dennis.
The audience for Hair was a surprisingly typical first-night crowd: lots of men in suits and their nervous-looking wives. Dennis was both disappointed and relieved. He would have enjoyed telling his mother that he’d spent the evening sitting amidst long-haired, bare-chested men and kohl-eyed, bare-breasted women, but many of the men looked as though they’d come straight from the City, and their wives straight off the 5.20 from Godalming. The men had a gleam in their eyes that might not have been there if they were about to sit through three hours of The Cherry Orchard, and there was a loud, and somewhat self-congratulatory, hum of anticipation before the curtain came up. But – and here was the relief – Dennis didn’t look out of place. He would go so far as to say that he looked rather young and bohemian compared to a lot of the people there – he’d decided, at the last moment and as a concession to the winds of change, to wear an open-necked shirt and a striped blazer. Sophie looked extraordinary in a canary-yellow minidress and white boots, and the photographers in the foyer surrounded her. She tried to involve Dennis in the pictures, a gesture he might have regarded as a significant advance had it not been for the immediate downwards drop of the cameras the moment he went to stand by her side.
They had aisle seats, dead centre, fifteen or so rows from the front, and within seconds of sitting down, Dennis found himself wishing that they were in the back row of the Royal Circle. Members of the cast were roaming the theatre, looking for accessible targets on whom to rain flowers and kisses. Sophie was not only accessible, but famous and attractive, so she was visited by several intimidatingly good-looking young men whose kisses were a rather more enthusiastic expression of the new age of peace, love and understanding than Dennis thought appropriate.
‘Steady on,’ he said to the third visitor, who apparently wanted to whet Sophie’s anticipation by inserting his tongue into her mouth.
The young man skipped away, apparently amused by the antiquity of the admonition, but he was immediately replaced by a young woman who leaned across Sophie to push a sunflower into Dennis’s hair. Finally, though, the lights went down, the show began and, despite occasional forays into the audience from the stage, Dennis and Sophie managed to avoid further trouble by studying their feet.
And, to Dennis’s surprise, he loved the play. It was a mess, in parts, but it was also chaotic, funny and gloriously tuneful, and the energy of the young actors was electrifying. Dennis spent as much time looking at the audience as he did at the stage, and more or less everywhere he looked there was genuine delight. The one exception was a scowling face a dozen or so seats to his left: it was Vernon Whitfield, who would go home and bash out a humourless, hostile and laughably prissy review for the Listener. It failed to mention, inevitably, that everyone around him was having the time of their lives.
The nudity was confined to one scene immediately before the interval, and Dennis tried not to find it difficult, but failed. What kind of idiot would go and see Hair on a first date? He was a pipe-smoking, beer-drinking comedy producer on the cusp of middle age; why had he thought it would be a good idea to sit down next to the most beautiful woman he had ever met, a woman several years his junior, while she examined the naked bodies of young male actors and singers? The seconds seemed like hours, and he tried to pass the time by attempting to find actors whose penises were beyond any shadow of a doubt roughly the same size as his own; he found two, neither of them belonging to the leading characters. They had been hidden away, presumably to avoid audience scorn and disappointment. Sophie tried to make eye contact during the scene, as if she’d sensed his tension and wanted to defuse it, but Dennis kept his eyes firmly on the stage. Afterwards, she tried to tease him about his goggle-eyed appreciation of the female form; he made a face suggesting that she’d caught him bang to rights. Better that way, he thought, than the confession that, such was his nervousness and self-doubt, he’d forgotten to look at any of the breasts and bottoms on display.