London: Keep Films Ltd., 1971

139pp. screenplay, bound in blue stiff paper wrappers secured with two split pins, window to front wrapper displaying title from title page. Revised pink pages bound in.

Revised second draft screenplay, dated January 1971 to title page. GRAHAM CROWDEN'S WORKING COPY, WITH HIS UNDERLININGS, ANNOTATIONS AND AMENDMENTS.

Peter Barnes' satirical state-of-the-nation play The Ruling Class had its first performance at the Nottingham Playhouse in 1968, and transferred to the West End the following year. Peter O'Toole acquired the film rights, and Barnes adapted his own play for the screen. Directed by Peter Medak and released in May 1972, O'Toole's supporting cast featured Alastair Sim, Arthur Lowe, Coral Browne, Harry Andrews -- and Graham Crowden as Dr. Truscott, 'the man from the loony bin' (and a lunatic himself), sent to assess the sanity of O'Toole's Earl of Gurney.

Part of the Royal Court's repertory company under George Devine, Graham Crowden [1922-2010] was a leading member of the stellar Old Vic/National Theatre company of the 1960s, and a scene-stealing performer on screen with nearly two hundred credits to his name. Crowden's working script for The Ruling Class is likely to have been the copy sent to him by the film's production office when he was offered the role, with revised pink pages, relating only to his scenes, tipped in at a later date. These pages are numbered 99, 100 and 102-104 (page 101 is the white original), and are heavily marked up by Crowden: his character's name has been boxed at every mention, and his stage directions underlined in yellow. Some lines have been deleted, added or rewritten, and there are a number of notes: by the line during which he is taking snuff, for example, Crowden suggests to himself'Sneeze?'. (He does indeed sneeze at this point in the film. Spectacularly.)

Intriguingly, the lines of the character McKyle are also underlined in this script. McKyle, a raving Scottish lunatic who thinks he's God, is played in the film by Nigel Green, whose natural accent was clipped, middle class and very English. Green's attempt at a Scottish accent seems not to have passed muster: on close inspection it's clear he was dubbed -- and almost certainly dubbed by Crowden, who was born in Edinburgh.