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And just to move on for a second, to Lettice. Lettice and Lovage, it seems to me that the
third time I felt a terrific social response to my work is in the particularly in the
stirring, the immense stirring--certainly in Great Britain, and I think to a large extent
here of the public to architecture. Itís awakened a kind of sleeping fury--sleeping
before, but no longer now when they contemplate the hideous world that has largely been created
for them by planners and by so-called architects and by people who are knighted and given awards
and decorations for making the world an abominable place to live in, visually. I mean, I thought
this was just a preoccupation of mine and, you know, a few other people. One discovered
yet again you know, I can only judge this by letters, the load of letters that came
in were like the letters I received on Equus or the letters I received from Amadeus. Itís
very comforting for a playwright to feel that the world out there shares his preoccupations
and his indignations, because you can feel you have to write it alone, the play, and
you feel that you may be just a lone voice. You hear all the characters speak in your
voice, what you are conducting is, for a long time, a monologue. There are two, of course,
clear stages in writing a play. They are absolutely opposed to each other and antithetical. The
first is sitting alone in a room hearing all the characters in your own voice. The second
is when you meet all these people: actors, directors, theatre people, producers, lighting,
set men, all that. And then the public, it just gets bigger and bigger in terms of the
number of people involved in the experience, and in this case, itís been a joy, in those
three plays, to feel that in each occasion the things that were interesting me also interested
a great many other people. And if you suffer, as I do, a bit, I used to suffer, from a sense
of invisibility, kind of thing, you know, feeling of being invisible, this is one way
of confirming, in some measure, to you, the fact that you exist, you do exist.