My Life in Pieces (12 page)

He carried on dancing virtually to the end, on one occasion only six days after a major operation on his kidney; discharging himself from hospital, he flew to Australia and danced with a catheter in place. With perfect symbolism, his last two performances were of an Angel (in Hungary) and, in Berlin, the evil witch Carabosse in
Sleeping Beauty
. He had both of these in him. His behaviour could be disgraceful, to friend and foe alike. Kavanagh never apologises for him, nor does she try to extenuate his frequently brutal conduct. What she makes clear is that these were flaws in a titanic human being who never ceased to strain every fibre of his being to serve dance. For him there was never any comfort zone. To be a dancer, he said, was ‘sacrificial work’. Violette Verdy noted that he came onto the stage as if into an arena: ‘Is he going to be eaten by the lion or not?’ ‘Audiences come to the theatre,’ he said, ‘to see people obsessed with what they do.’ Kavanagh’s book, apart from its comprehensive and compulsively readable account of Nureyev’s life and art, is an important wake-up call to the lily-livered rest of us: this is what theatre can be, but only if we give it everything: nothing less will do.

I saw all these things with my box-office colleagues, Christine and Roger
and Beverley, and Joan from the bookstall. It was to them that I shyly con
fessed my new-found desire to be an actor, and that I was gay. Neither
confession caused the slightest surprise; they had known both before I did.

I have described elsewhere how, once I had decided to become an actor, I
chose to go to university rather than drama school, how I went to Queen’s
University in Belfast, how on the strength of my having come from the box
office of the National Theatre I was given the leading male part in
The Seagull
by the University Drama Society, how absolutely dreadful I knew
myself to be in the part, and how that realisation gave me the determina
tion to go to drama school to find out whether I had any talent at all. I have
also written about my encounter with a man who changed my life: the
great Irish actor Micheál mac Liammóir, who with his partner Hilton
Edwards had created the Gate Theatre in Dublin, the exotic counterpoise to
the Abbey: the two theatres were famously known as Sodom and Begor
rah. I wangled a commission from the student newspaper
Gown
to go
down to Dublin to interview mac Liammóir, which I did, taking a Heath
Robinson recording device with me, but on my return, rapidly tiring of the
process of transcribing the tape, I switched the contraption off and relied
on memory and evocation. I sent a copy of the shamelessly rewritten inter
view to mac Liammóir who wrote back: ‘Professional journalists could
learn from the wonderfully accurate account you gave of what I said.’ It
was the first piece of mine ever to appear in a newspaper, in March 1969.

Harcourt Terrace, No. 4, a fine Georgian building somewhere in Dublin, that complex, vital, intermittently beautiful city full of books and flourishing theatres. The house is something of a mac Liammóir museum: prints, theatre bills, designs, line the walls. Inside the sitting room, shelves and shelves of books, with Beardsley designs on the walls. I was met by two intelligent if rather emotional Siamese cats and engaged with them till the entry, in style, of mac Liammóir himself. ‘I’m infectious,’ he said; perfectly true, of course, but on this occasion he meant that he had a cold. The interview began.

– Mr mac Liammóir, you are associated in the minds of most people of my generation with your brilliant and witty one-man shows, particularly
The Importance of Being Oscar
, in which your own personality comes over as strongly as the material you’re presenting. Is it distressing for you when you’re billed as a witty person, to have to produce a bon mot to order?

– Well do you know, I’ve never thought of myself as a witty person. I’ve never felt obliged to produce anything if I didn’t want to. I’ve never felt on a tightrope except with certain people whom I invariably dislike and avoid as much as I possibly can. I am only productive of wit or anything at all if it comes out with a certain sympathy or is spontaneous. It is no good putting me on a tightrope because I immediately fall off with the greatest crash. As to Oscar, Oscar has never had the faintest effect on me… I regard him as an uncanny, dead friend: he’s like somebody I know terribly well and like enormously; and the only thing I don’t like is being – what you said just now – continually identified with him – not because of any dislike of his personality; or being coupled with somebody who
was primarily in the popular mind a figure of scandal – not at all – but I dislike being coupled with anybody except myself, if you see what I mean; nobody wants to be the shadow of another man: Wilde himself said that cheap editions of great books were delightful, but cheap editions of great men were perfectly detestable.

I chose him because I feel equipped to interpret him. I’ve been influenced if at all by his humour more than his philosophy; his good humour more than anything else; the absurdity, the glamour and the luxury, the danger of it all. To think that he was an Irishman! And that this rather drab little country of ours should produce such a glowing peacock.

– You have devoted a great part of your life to instilling some colour through the medium of theatre into this ‘drab little country’.

– Yes, though of course I didn’t return to this country – when I was seventeen and after years on the London stage as a boy actor – to act; even I wasn’t crazy enough to do that.

– How’s that?

– Well – I’ve said before in print – if a London, New York, Paris, Berlin actor has a success he buys a new car, a new house, a new stair carpet, he keeps fixing himself more and more; the Irish actor if he has a success has to pack his suitcase, he has to go away and take his goods elsewhere: you run through the Irish populace like a dose of salts, do you see; there are so few of us. The entire theatrical problem in Ireland is lack of population. It has a degrading effect on the work; it drives us all to repertory and ill-prepared, there’s not enough time. In a huge city you can run in a play for a year, probably soul-crushing if you don’t like the part, and during the last few weeks, once you know the dates, you can start preparing your next part, slowly and in plenty of time, whereas we have two weeks to put on some great dramatic work of art. This problem of adequate rehearsal time is especially evident in Belfast.

Belfast is very tragic; a city the same size of Dublin; it is not as lucky as Dublin, but it is one of the most brilliant audiences in the world, I’ve found; astonishingly receptive and perceptive – what the whole of Ireland wants, North and South, it doesn’t matter, is a form of specialisation; what we lack here is discrimination as a result of seeing perfect work; and perfect work is presumably only the outcome of a certain amount of specialisation. Nevertheless, there is abundant room for both amateur and professional – their feud has been exaggerated by both sides – as long
as they are criticised separately as different things; I first played Hamlet in Dublin when I was twenty-eight or twenty-nine – some years ago, as you can imagine – and was received with glowing almost hysterical reviews. Then a couple of weeks later I opened the same paper, the same critic, and almost exactly the same review, for a boy of sixteen at the local grammar school! The best amateur performances are students’; the hope is that student drama will act as an incubator and that some boy or girl will go into the proper theatre. When the talent is genuine, I think it will find its way.

– There is also, with university productions, the opportunity to experiment because box-office is not the overriding consideration.

– That is a blessing – and a curse because sordid as it might seem, the box office is one side of a set of values, of a proof; it’s a proof that the public is coming, that the public has been touched. The theatre at its best is essentially popular: the Greeks knew that, Shakespeare knew it, God knows.

– The opinion has been expressed that merely theatrical criteria are hopelessly ostrich-like in a situation such as we have in Ulster at the moment, and that the political situation should be used to bring people into the theatre; a production of
Oedipus
with Ian Paisley in the title role…?

– I should’ve thought he’d be better as Jocasta, wouldn’t you? We’ve all done that sort of thing, or course; Hilton and I produced
Julius Caesar
once in a sort of Fascist manner – at the time when all that was current, you know – I forget which side the Fascists were on… but it was very effective and wonderful; and it brought the war home. The great error with these updated settings is the error of modern detail… Ophelia wearing a miniskirt would ruin any romance, I should think. All these girls going around thinking they look like Rosalind and in fact looking like a very bad Dick Whittington.

– Mr mac Liammóir, one thinks of you now, as I said before, almost exclusively as a performer of one-man shows.

– That reminds me of a very funny story told me by Emlyn, Emlyn Williams, a great friend of mine; he does them too, Dickens, Dylan Thomas. He was asked on one of his tours, ‘Tell me, Mr Williams, do you like this better than acting?’ It’s the same art with a difference; it’s a soloist performance. I don’t miss all the things in the theatre which Emlyn
misses: the fun, the gossip, the scandal, the slammed doors; I love being without all that, I love it: the privacy and the dignity of it, in a way; always…

– But is it an essentially theatrical thing for one man to hold the stage alone, displaying his own personality; does it really use the medium of the theatre?

– I think so, yes, in a different form – invented, incidentally, by a woman, Ruth Draper – and it seemed to me for a long time an essentially feminine art: she dressed up for each characterisation, and of course women can do far more with that sort of thing than we can; when John Gielgud did
The Seven Ages of Man
– which I think is wonderful (though I think it’s a mistake to do those things in three parts – it gives them too long to think and discuss you and wonder what the hell you’re going to do next); I thought, well, that’s Shakespeare – that’s different – and then Emlyn with Dickens and I never thought of being a one-man performer though I’d always suspected it in
Hamlet
because I was always so relieved when Rosencrantz and Guildenstern went away. ‘I’m SO glad those little bores are going off,’ I used to think… ‘God be wi’ ye, sir…’ ‘God be wi’ ye… thank God.’ So probably that was the beginning. It isn’t necessarily that you’ve got to be a great actor to be a one-man performer – probably indeed the greatest actors wouldn’t have done it well – it’s a talent or a knack, just like having a talent for languages – just a knack of personality.

No doubt my subsequent ventures in one-man performances have been
deeply influenced by Micheál’s example; he was also the most completely
open gay man I had encountered (though of course I never so much as
hinted at it in the piece). What would I have said? There was nothing fey
about him, nothing limp or nancy. The word ‘outrageous’ better describes
him, but the most striking fact to me was simply that his homosexuality
seemed to be the very foundation of his personality.

I looked after him when he came to adjudicate the Drama Festival, and
then all the peacock brilliance went out of our lives and things settled
down to a more regular level. For a brief while, I thought that I would stay
at Queen’s, seize power in the Drama Society and create dazzling theatre.
I had seen a play in London which thrilled me beyond measure,
The Ruling Class
, by Peter Barnes, and I had written a passionately enthusiastic
letter to his agent, the legendary Peggy Ramsay, to ask for the rights. She 
had at first pooh-poohed me, writing to say that regional rights had to be
granted first and I would have to wait my turn, dear, but the following
day I got another letter from her saying that she’d sent my letter to
Barnes, and that he’d told her to release the rights to me. Too late; the die
was cast. I had decided to run away and become an actor. It was a sort of
turning point: had I done
The Ruling Class
, and had it been a success, I
suppose I would have stayed at Queen’s, and finished my degree, and
learned to make theatre of a sort. But my instinct to go away and subject
myself to the most challenging training I could find was, I believe, the right
one – indeed, the only possible one. So I must be very grateful that Peggy
said no, the first of many good turns she was to do me.

As it happens, Peter Barnes subsequently became one of my very dearest
friends. I wrote this obituary for the Royal Literary Society in 2005.

When I saw
The Ruling Class
at the Piccadilly Theatre in 1968, I had no doubt whatever that I had witnessed a work of genius, an authentic modern masterpiece. Pinter and Bond were the heroes of a slightly older generation than mine: they were already established and revered and had around them an aura of profundity; their very crypticness and unknowability put them in the running to be the heirs of Beckett, and though I made the conventional obeisances in their direction, I was secretly frustrated by their lack of communicativeness.
The Ruling Class
was what I had been craving for: eloquent, anarchic, theatrical, hilarious, exhilaratingly anti-Establishment.

It was designed to get up people’s noses – ten people walked out at the performance I saw – their seats thrillingly springing back ‘Thunk! Thunk! Thunk!’ when Jack Gurney’s marriage vows commenced with the phrase ‘From the bottom of my heart to the tip of my penis.’ But for me when Tuck the butler confessed to having pee’d in the Thirteenth Earl’s soup every day for forty years, when Jack came on for his wedding night on a tricycle singing Verdi, when the House of Lords was pushed on from either side of the wings bearing their lordships’ skeletons draped across the benches, the serried ranks of corpses covered in cobwebs, I felt that as long as writers of this vitality, passion and rage continued to write for the theatre, it would live for ever. I was at university, and asked if I could do the play for the Drama Society. Against all known practice, and with minimal chance of his earning a penny, he said yes.