Among the equipment on show in Quartermaine’s Terms, the play that Simon Gray set in a Cambridge language school, is “a large new tape-recorder, sophisticated for the period”, meaning the early 1960s. Well, a decade later The Literary Review sent me to interview Gray at his home with just such a monster machine, assuring me that, although it might not seem to work, it really, truly, absolutely did. And so we talked and talked, covering subjects that included his dislike of being called cynical and his affection for the most unlikeable of his characters.
Yes, he had a soft spot even for the idle, wayward, malicious, self-serving, self-destructive title character of Butley, the 1971 play now at the Duchess, with Dominic West flinging