Andrew Lloyd Webber and Alan Ayckbourn on their ‘traumatic’ megaflop Jeeves

There’s an anniversary looming on April 22 that neither Alan Ayckbourn nor Andrew Lloyd Webber will be rushing to celebrate. It will be 50 years since the official unveiling of “Jeeves”, the pair’s disastrous attempt to fashion a rip-roaring hoot, and hit, from one of the great comic literary properties of the 20^th century: PG Wodehouse’s Jeeves books. It’s often held as the biggest theatrical flop of the 1970s, and of their careers. Even though the pair would ultimately wrest victory from defeat, with a successful rewritten version By Jeeves in 1996, it was a blot on their CV.

An opening night that should have met with rapturous applause and raves elicited cat-calls from the gallery and savage reviews (“Disastrous” – the Telegraph) that ensured the curtain fell on the show at Her Majesty’s after a month.

It was the ignominious climax to a saga that had seen a calamitous try-out in Bristol, shock sackings – including the last-minute departure of the director – and a near-mutiny by the cast. That Lloyd Webber was braced for the worst was evidenced by the fact he wasn’t present as the ordeal unfolded; he retreated nearby, to dine with Ayckbourn at the old “Petit Club Français”. The night ended with the latter attempting to rally an inconsolable David Hemmings. The baby-faced heart-throb, who had made his name in Antonioni’s Blow-Up, literally collapsed in a heap after valiantly carrying the show as Bertie Wooster.

“Somebody said, ‘I think you guys had better go and see David,’ Ayckbourn, now 85, recalls, “‘He’s absolutely distraught. He has had the most terrible evening.’ So we went along to his dressing-room. David’s girlfriend was shouting into the shower. David was in there, crouching in the corner, naked, the water full on. She was saying: ‘You can’t stay in there, David, it isn’t your fault!’ And I said: ‘David, it’s Alan. Look, we’re really sorry, mate, it’s nothing to do with you. The whole show went wrong from the minute we started it.’ I was dressed up for the first night and got soaking wet. I went home and watched TV.”

“It was,” he continues, when we meet in Scarborough, “the most traumatic moment of my life.” Lloyd Webber doesn’t put it in quite those terms but tells me: “I was obviously very, very, very upset about it”. In his memoir, Unmasked, he memorably describes the show as a “driverless juggernaut hurtling downhill”.

With hindsight, the co-ordinates looked set for catastrophe from early on. But the omens, initially, were promising. Ayckbourn was the new darling of the West End, riding high with Absurd Person Singular and The Norman Conquests, while at 25 Lloyd Webber’s stock was through the roof thanks to Jesus Christ Superstar, already a fixture in London. Their names helped ensure a high-calibre cast – aside from Hemmings, there was Michael Aldridge, later of Last of the Summer Wine fame, playing Jeeves and adored comic actress Betty Marsden as Aunt Dahlia. Wodehouse was so persuaded of the project’s potential he gave it his blessing.

But if Ayckbourn and Lloyd Webber sounded like “a dream team”, one salient fact in making sense of the debacle is that Ayckbourn’s role as the book-writer was expanded at short-notice to take in lyric-writing because Lloyd Webber’s other half, creatively - Tim Rice - bailed early. After unfruitful weeks of slogging on a script derived from The Code of the Woosters and songs, Rice realised, he says in his memoir, that “All I was doing was making the master PG Wodehouse unfunny – quite an achievement”. And he had chanced on a compelling alternative: the life of Eva Peron.

Alarm-bells began to ring for Ayckbourn almost as soon as he got on-board, following a merry, boozy evening with the pair on a canal boat.

There was no sign of Rice at the ensuing meeting the next day, and Lloyd Webber tried to persuade Ayckbourn that writing lyrics was “‘a piece of p**s.’ I was thinking: ‘This is surreal,’ and that set the tone.”

Indeed the ensuing visit to Wodehouse on Long Island in the autumn of 1974 (he died on Valentine’s Day the following year) sounds surreal in the extreme. Ayckbourn’s stand-out memory of this somewhat strained showcase, presented in a suitably piano-equipped house “owned by a prominent drug dealer”, is of reaching the end and the kindly “Plum”, as he was nicknamed, being swept – dismayed - past a groaning table of sandwiches he had had his eye on by his wife Ethel: “She said: ‘Come on, we’re off!’” Lloyd Webber remembers Wodehouse – who had enjoyed success as a lyricist, not least contributing “Bill” to Show Boat – saying: “‘Are you sure my characters are strong enough to sustain something like this?’ And of course you know that’s very telling.”

Telling, too, was the gargantuan size of the script that Ayckbourn delivered just before rehearsals. “It made Gone with the Wind look like a pamphlet,” Lloyd Webber jokes. David Wood, the children’s playwright, then also an actor, who was cast as Bertie’s pal Bingo Little, a job that involved a terrifying-sounding bit of comic business that required him to be suspended from a chandelier, remembers his outspoken agent Peggy Ramsay (also Ayckbourn’s) saying: “she knew there was going to be a problem as soon as she heard the script landing on the doormat. She could tell it was far too long.”

Lloyd Webber hadn’t attempted a ‘book musical’ before, Ayckbourn was a musicals novice and he recruited another newcomer to the form to direct, his regular collaborator Eric Thompson (father of Emma, and well-known too on account of The Magic Roundabout). The set designer was the Polish émigré Voytek, whose vision was of a green minimalist box, into which items of furniture would be sparingly introduced. “It was the most hideous set I’ve ever seen,” Lloyd Webber observes – and, as the cast discovered, it was so thickly constructed they struggled to hear the cues.

There was mounting collective anxiety from early on – glances were exchanged when Thompson reduced the rehearsal period to four weeks, and also suggested the cast simply speed up their delivery to cut the running-time - but Lloyd Webber saw himself as “too junior” to intervene. Thompson used drink as a crutch, as did Hemmings, who would start in the morning. “There was always a bottle of Hirondelle on the table and Eric was always sending out for more,” shudders Lloyd Webber. “I was just thinking: “Help, help!””

By the time the show arrived at the Bristol Hippodrome for a try-out it had become preposterously unwieldy. Cast as Madeline Bassett, Gabrielle Drake – who was reeling from the recent death of her brother Nick, the singer-songwriter – remembers the technical rehearsal lasting for several days, leaving no time for a dress rehearsal. “The first performance ran around four and three-quarter hours. When the curtain came down we were all so relieved that it had ended without a disaster, we didn’t care.”

Finally the penny dropped that substantial cuts were needed. Ayckbourn suggested axing Aunt Dahlia; Thompson was required to relay the news to Marsden. “I sat beside him, and Betty came in and, ‘Hello darlings… What the **** are we going to do?’ Eric said, ‘Well, Betty…’ She said, ‘Don’t tell me, you’ve cut my ****ing part!’ There was silence. Then the air turned blue and Eric went pale. Of course, it sent a shock-wave through the company. People were going: ‘Well, it’s you next!’”

In fact it was Thompson who got the boot, five days before the London press night, the composer’s pleas for the run at Her Majesty’s to be abandoned having fallen on deaf ears. Ayckbourn was summoned to the (hitherto alarmingly absent) co-producer Robert Stigwood’s house in north London in the dead of the night. “He said: ‘The first thing I want to do is get rid of the director.’ I said: ‘I don’t think he’s to blame.’ And he said: ‘He lost control of it and I want you to take over.’ Of course when I got there in the morning, nobody wanted to know, and the whole cast were extremely hostile.”

Ayckbourn’s working relationship with Thompson (who died in 1982) never recovered. What both he and Lloyd Webber insist on, though, is that the two of them never fell out, and one surprising twist in the tale is how much solidarity arose in the cast. Even though Drake can still recite some of the more toe-curling lyrics (“Even Mr Moon’s begun to snore/ Good grief, no more”), she cherishes the camaraderie: “I dined out on it a lot”, she says, with a sang-froid worthy of Wooster’s unflappable valet. “If you’re going to be in a flop, best it be a huge one.”

Ever one to accentuate the positives, Lloyd Webber believes that – the vindication of the nimbler 1996 incarnation aside – his own fortunes were improved, not dented, by the flop. It prompted the hand of friendship, and some top-hole advice, from the American director Hal Prince – who urged him to persevere and stay in touch. “Neither Evita nor The Phantom of the Opera might have happened were it not for Jeeves.”

Ayckbourn left nothing to chance at the 1996 try-out for By Jeeves at the Stephen Joseph in Scarborough, though. “I got the Archbishop of York in to bless the building on press night. I said: ‘I need an exorcism, please!’”

Further reading: David Wood’s memoir “Elizabeth Taylor’s Kiss” (published by the Book Guild) includes a chapter on Jeeves; see also Unmasked by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Grinning at the Edge, Paul Allen’s biography of Ayckbourn