R.I.P. Denis Cannan

[Reza]

Obituaries London Telegraph


Denis Cannan, who has died aged 92, was an
admired British playwright who, before the advent
of the Angry Young Men, wrote elegant,
exhilarating and somewhat fantastical comedies
about the absurdities of love and war.

6:01PM GMT 02 Nov 2011

The best and most successful, Captain Carvallo,
was taken up by Laurence Olivier, then managing
the St James's Theatre, in 1950. A tale of a
young philanderer in a distant country billeted
with two partisans who cannot bring themselves to
obey their orders to kill him, it met with
immediate and almost universal acclaim, welcomed
not only for its poetic fancy but also for its
theatricality and sharp-witted intelligence.

Cannan went on to write other comedies in a
similar ironical vein, and his relish of language
and his sense of satire won plaudits from
critics. But the general public could not be
persuaded to respond as readily to his
tongue-in-cheek humour; and though he never
renounced the theatre, working with Peter Brook
on such productions as The Power and the Glory,
US, and The Ik, as well as winning a Play of the
Year award in 1976 for Dear Daddy, he turned more
and more to films and television, achieving wide
recognition on the small screen with playlets
such as One Day At A Time, Home Movies and By George!

He was born Denis Pullein-Thompson in Oxford on
May 14 1919 into a family of writers. His mother
(whose name he later adopted professionally) was
the author Joanna Cannan, and he was brother to
the writers Christine, Diana and Josephine
Pullein-Thompson. After Eton, he began as an
actor in East Lynne at Henley-on-Thames and
continued to work in rep between 1937 and 1939.

He served in the Queen's Royal Regiment as a
captain until 1945 and was mentioned in despatches.

After the war Cannan acted for two years at
Glasgow Citizens Theatre. In 1949 he had his
first play, Max, produced at the Malvern
Festival, where he was acting in three plays by
Shaw. Max was a study of a demobilised soldier
who meets the family of a man he has killed on
duty. The victim's mother plots to kill him.
Despite the play's melodramatic outline and
muddled motivation, Cannan won approval for his
noble indignation at the follies of mankind.
That indignation was to mount over the years, and colour his later works.

Meanwhile, he was still acting. He made his first
London appearance in Shaw's Buoyant Billions
(1949) when it transferred from Malvern. He then
acted with the Bristol Old Vic for a season in
two Shakespeare plays before Olivier seized on
Captain Carvallo. Cannan acted in only two more
plays John Whiting's A Penny For A Song (1951)
and Neville Croft's All The Year Round before
convincing himself that he could live off his writing.

He translated Jean Anouilh's Colombe (1951), and
his next two plays came up for production in
1955. Misery Me! was a Cold War satire; You and
Your Wife, a slighter but still briskly
intelligent piece, described the hold-up of two
quarrelsome couples by a pair of gangsters.

After making a stage version, with Pierre Bost,
of Graham Greene's novel The Power and the Glory
(1956) for Brook to direct, Cannan tried his hand
at an intellectual farce, Who's Your Father?,
about a newly-rich couple and their daughter's suitor.

Then came an eight-year theatrical pause, during
which Cannan wrote screenplays: Alive and
Kicking; Don't Bother To Knock (with Frederic
Raphael and Frederic Gotfurt); Sammy Going South;
The Amorous Adventures of Moll Flanders; and A
High Wind In Jamaica (with Ronald Harwood and Stanley Mann).

He returned to the stage with the original,
much-altered script for the Royal Shakespeare
Company's Vietnam show, US, directed by Peter
Brook (1966). No one knew how much of Cannan's
text survived rehearsals, but he was credited
with Glenda Jackson's outburst at Britain's
non-participation in the war, in which Cannan
shockingly sought to pierce British moral
detachment and drive home the reality of
conflict: I would like to see an English dog
playing on an English lawn with part of a burned
hand. I would like to see a gas grenade go off at an English flower show ...

Admirers of the formerly non-political playwright
noted that he was no longer sitting on the fence.
Cannan helped to adapt US for the cinema under the title Tell Me Lies.

After making a new version of Ibsen's Ghosts for
the RSC (1966), he scripted the film Mayerling
(1968) with Terence Young. His next stage play,
One At Night (1971), described with intellectual
vehemence the defence of a middle-aged man
against his incarceration in a mental hospital
for seducing a girl of 16. Here the author's
arguments were more supple than his stagecraft,
despite Roy Dotrice's brave acting .

After helping on the text of another Brook
production, The Ik, Cannan came up with a
domestic tragicomedy, Dear Daddy (1976).
Characteristically intelligent and provocative,
it again suffered from the author's use of the
stage more as a platform for his ideas than as a
place to tell a story, but it gave Nigel Patrick
plenty to do as a father facing an inquisition from his dissatisfied family.

Denis Cannan was a voracious reader, and despite
later ill health remained as sharp and acerbic as
ever. Peter Brook remained a close friend, and
has written recently of one joint excursion
when they were working together on The Power and
the Glory to take in a Billy Graham rally in Harringay Stadium.

Cannan, in jest, joined the evangelical fervour,
and when asked by the preacher for his name,
could think only of Greene. On announcing that he
too was Graham, he became the star convert of the day.

Denis Cannan was married twice, first to Joan
Ross, in 1946, with whom he had two sons and a
daughter, and secondly, in 1965, to Rose Evansky.

Denis Cannan, born May 14 1919, died September 25 2011