My Life in Pieces (13 page)

I didn’t meet Barnes for some years, but when I did I realised that that was him all over: he didn’t care about the money, he didn’t even care whether the plays were done to the highest level of professional polish, he just wanted them done, wanted to be allowed to tell his hilarious ‘anecdotes of destiny’ (his admiration for Isak Dinesen, whose phrase that is, was absolute) – above all, he wanted to make ’em laugh. On the whole, he felt that Macbeth had got it more or less right: life was indeed a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing, but somehow this fact – far from depressing him – gave him endless satisfaction. His own life was a perfect case in point: dozens of brilliant plays and adaptations piling up which no one who had any money would put on, though stars were queuing up to play the parts – plays crying out for the resources of the National Theatre or the Royal Shakespeare Company, whose actors and audiences would have revelled in them; while television companies simply couldn’t pour enough money into his bank account for writing the screenplays he turned out before breakfast and the serious work of the day had begun. He actually tried putting up the money out of his own pocket for a production of
Clap Hands, Here Comes Charlie
, one of his most delirious and outrageous inventions, but somehow they even managed to stop him from doing that.

In his domestic life he watched his beloved first wife Charlotte slip away mentally, and would sit stoically and practically as she succumbed to paranoid delusion, reasoning with her, supporting her, feeding her, all the while behaving as if nothing out of the ordinary were happening. ‘That’s life,’ he seemed to be feeling. Ben Jonson was his great hero, but it was the language, the energy, the invention that he loved, not Jonson’s dark and bitter heart. Peter had no judgement to offer on his fellow human beings: ‘We’re all in it together,’ was his view. ‘None of it makes any sense, let’s have a laugh.’ He winkled out laughter from the most unlikely places: Belsen, the court of Ivan the Terrible, the bubonic plague, horrors to which the only possible human response was a joke. He was astonished, and delighted, when American companies suddenly started performing his plague play,
Red Noses, Black Death
, because they construed it as a response to AIDS. His point had simply been that purity of heart and a good belly laugh can cure the world. ‘I jest, therefore I am’ are the words that should be inscribed on his tombstone. When he died, I sent a card with the flowers: ‘Was it something I said?’ I like to think he saw the card from the great Reading Room in the sky, and let out one of his great banshee laughs.

This rare man leaves behind him a beautiful wife, four bonny babies, and a legacy of plays produced and unproduced – including his stupendous adaptations of the other Great Unperformed of dramatic literature – which could keep a theatre company going for half a century without once repeating itself. His voice is to be heard in all of them, loud, profane and clear; how we need that voice as the coalition of the correct goes about its business of extinguishing all traces of the great medieval carnival world that Peter never ceased to celebrate. Now he’s swapping jokes with Rabelais, Chaucer, Marie Lloyd and Max Miller. Lucky them, poor us.

I also wrote the following paragraph for the ‘Lives Remembered’ column
of
The Times
obituary section.

While properly jaunty, given its indestructibly jaunty subject, your fine obituary of Peter Barnes somewhat underplays the tragedy of a writer out of step with his times – or, more precisely, with fashion. Admired and indeed deeply loved by many of his fellow professionals – actors, directors, fellow writers who would gather together at his annual Christmas party – Barnes never found the sort of influential friend in high places who might have ensured productions for his plays, the only thing, apart from his wife Christy and their almost miraculously late-appearing brood, that Peter really cared about. He belonged to no discernible group, and was influenced by no one who had not been dead for four hundred years. That glorious, darkly exuberant neo-Jacobean anatomy of the English class system,
The Ruling Class
, one of the greatest of post-war plays, has never even had a significant revival. Some of us struggled vainly for years to mount one, or, more ambitiously, to stage a season of some of Barnes’s numberless unproduced works (including many fine and imaginative versions of the plays of the lesser-known masters whose work he so loved), but as they were all enormous in their demands – and as often as not set in the thirteenth century – they required the resources of the National Theatre or the Royal Shakespeare Company, and recent artistic directors of both those organisations made no secret of their lack of enthusiasm for his work, which is perfectly reasonable, but rotten luck for him, and for us, audiences and actors alike. Peter and I once came very close to raising the money for an inaugural three-play season of
what we only half-jokingly referred to as the Royal Barnes Company, but at the last minute, as so often, the funding melted away. Peter simply sighed, and got on with writing the next play – also unproduced. His unperformed legacy amounts to an Aladdin’s Cave of glittering and hilarious dramatic audacities which it is be hoped a new generation might be allowed to see in the theatre, where they belong.

Now, with
The Ruling Class
unperformed, I was liberated from academia,
and I had to find a drama school. But before that, I needed to earn a liv
ing. Hearing that I was about to sign on with a cleaning agency, my old
National Theatre chum Roger, who was now No. 2 at the Mermaid The
atre box office but about to return to the National, got me a job there
before he left, and the great Joan Robinson, Bernard Miles’s legendary Box
Office Manager, found herself saddled with this overexcited aspirant actor
with almost uncontrollable energy. The high point of my time there came
one Monday morning in autumn 1969 when my colleague Arthur (Arfs
Mincewell, I dubbed him, for fairly obvious, in fact screamingly obvious,
reasons) and I, expecting a restful morning, found ourselves fighting our
way through a huge and totally unforeseen queue which wound its way
round the building all the way down to the river. The Prospect Theatre
Company was opening at the Mermaid for a season of
Richard II
and
Edward II
with an admired but not especially famous young actor called
Ian McKellen in the two title roles. There had up till now been only the
mildest interest in the shows, but the day before, the
Sunday Times
had
carried a review by the critic Harold Hobson of positively ecstatic fervour,
acclaiming McKellen in terms that would have made the Saviour Himself
blush. So, the following day, there was a queue. Arfs and I threw open the
box-office window and started selling for all we were worth. We gave up
putting the money in the till quite early on, so that when Joan Robinson
arrived at midday, we were knee-deep in banknotes. Instead of being
acclaimed as box-office heroes, as we’d fondly imagined, we were soundly
berated for having let all the house seats go and told to pick up all the
money and not go anywhere near the window. (Eventually poor Joan was
reduced to buying back tickets from the public so that she’d have some
thing to give the agents, on whose business she relied during leaner times.)

Normally, things were very much quieter. There was a production of a
play by William Trevor called
The Old Boys
, of which the star was Sir
Michael Redgrave. The great actor had just started to succumb to the
effects of the Parkinson’s disease which finally engulfed him. He couldn’t
remember a word of the script, so the stage management improvised a
sort of walkie-talkie for him which was wired up to the prompt corner.
When he needed a line – which was always – he was to tap on his chest
and the text would be forthcoming. He found it hard to get the hang of it,
and would quite openly ask the stage manager, via the apparatus, to repeat
the line, as if he were on the telephone. This made life a little difficult for
his fellow actors. A number of the audience, many of whom were almost
as infirm as he was, were displeased by this, and would vent their rage at
me, demanding their money back. I hope Sir Michael never knew about
these complaints. The show was a pitiful spectacle, but Redgrave somehow
maintained his dignity, and against all the odds, his performance was
rather moving. I reviewed Alan Strachan’s book about Redgrave,
Secret Dreams
, for the
Guardian
; Strachan was the director of
The Old Boys.

Alan Strachan is right to point out that when John Gielgud’s obituaries were written, and his place in the theatrical pantheon assessed, Michael Redgrave was inexplicably omitted from the list of Britain’s greatest twentieth-century actors. The fine and judicious biography he has written does an important service in restoring a major figure to its rightful place in the theatrical landscape. It must, however, be said that, detailed as never before, both the career and the man emerge if anything somewhat more enigmatic than they were before it. Inevitably, Redgrave, whose last major creation was Jaraby in
The Old Boys
at the Mermaid in 1971, is remembered by fewer theatregoers than the other great actors who all had Indian summers well into their seventies. His distinguished body of film work – including superb performances in
The Browning Version
,
Dead of Night
and
The Stars Look Down
– is perhaps better known, and fortunately now includes the television film of the Chichester Festival production of
Uncle Vanya
(made for pay TV and unavailable for many years), which preserves his nonpareil performance in the title role, generally regarded as the crowning glory of his work in the theatre.

If nothing had survived but this one performance, he would on the strength of it have joined the ranks of the Immortals. For a while the complete soundtrack of the production was available on LP and even in this form the performance is both electrifying and heartbreaking from
the moment he speaks his first line: the sound of a soul in anguish leaps off the vinyl grooves, all the more potent because of the graceful vocal attributes of the actor, melodious and minutely expressive of every emotional nuance. On DVD the portrait of emotional and spiritual devastation is complete: the great towering physique (6’3” – for many years he thought he was too tall to be an actor), the splendid build, the handsome face, infinitely sensitive, softly rugged, hair flopping about, beard unkempt, limbs limp and loose. The character’s life is inhabited with profound complexity but also a kind of transcendent poetry: absolutely real but on an epic scale, the reality of life itself, not merely of one life. His co-star, the director of the production, is Laurence Olivier, an actor of a very different colour, no less masterful, it goes without saying; his Dr Astrov a brilliantly achieved, deeply felt performance of unique theatrical effectiveness. But Redgrave’s achievement is of a different order. He does what only the very greatest acting does – he opens up the secret places of the human heart, allowing us to glimpse truths about ourselves that we can barely acknowledge, in Vanya’s case the overwhelming sense of waste, the impossibility of love, the death of hope.

Michael Redgrave knew about such things. As if at destiny’s behest, his early life shaped him to experience loss, disappointment, rejection. He was unique among the great actors of the twentieth century in that he was actually born into the theatre – not merely connected to it, as Gielgud was, but of it, although, paradoxically, he was the latest starter of them all. Both parents were actors, as were many of his forebears. His father, Roy, was a feckless charmer of a barnstormer who made his way to Australia, where he triumphed in outback melodramas, occasionally featuring live sheep; his mother Daisy (belonging more to the legitimate theatre) and the infant Michael joined Roy, somewhat against Roy’s will, and stayed with him for a little while, during which time the boy made his stage debut, running on at the end of a sentimental monologue to cry ‘Daddy!’ In fact, he couldn’t bring himself to utter the word and instead burst into tears, which is a very nice metaphor both for his relationship to his father (from whom they parted shortly after and whom he never saw again) and for the unusual degree of emotion he was to bring to his own work as an actor. His childhood, back in England, was as unsettled as the life of the child of a single parent who was a jobbing actress on tour could hardly fail to be, and he was constantly given over to the care of aunts (and ‘aunts’), frequently depending on the kindness of landladies.
Then, quite without warning, his mother married a very respectable and comfortably off businessman and their lives changed hugely for the better – in the material sense, at least; Redgrave was plunged into the inevitable Oedipal alienation, in addition to resenting what he felt to be the bourgeois nature of their new life. He was sent to a minor public school where he was blessed by the presence of an inspired English teacher who staged plays to a high level of excellence. He also experienced the usual intense crushes on various fellow pupils; before long he had been to bed both with men and women.

Both sexes were understandably smitten by this immensely handsome, elegant, witty and endlessly vulnerable young man. At Cambridge, in the late Twenties, he had long-term love affairs with several men (among them the publisher John Lehmann), moved in Bloomsbury circles and was in touch with many of the Apostles; this was the epoch of Burgess (who designed a play for him) and Blunt (with whom he co-edited a magazine). He was confirmed in his left-wing political attitudes, though never formally a Marxist. He was not a diligent scholar, but absorbed a very wide culture, particularly during a visit to Heidelberg, where for the first time he saw the latest opera –
Rosenkavalier
, which overwhelmed him – and subsidised theatre and Expressionist cinema, all of which influenced him deeply in his vision of what the theatre and performing arts could be; he was awed by a performance by Louis Jouvet, whom he took to be the very model of what an actor should be, ‘a real
homme du théâtre
’, as he admiringly wrote. He had considerable ambitions as a writer (his instinctive verbal sense emerges vividly in a letter in which he describes a girl with whom he shares a dance as ‘round and splodgy with an aggressive sniff and a laugh like the death rattle of a winkle’) but not, as yet, as an actor. Instead he became a schoolmaster at Cranleigh, but plunged immediately into directing and acting in productions there, playing Hamlet, Lear and Samson Agonistes. By the age of twenty-six he felt strong enough to enter the professional fray, and was lucky enough to secure a place at William Armstrong’s Liverpool Rep, where he played a vast range of parts in the course of a year, and met his wife, Rachel Kempson. Within a year he had been snapped up by the Old Vic and was playing Orlando opposite Edith Evans’s Rosalind, one of the great romantic partnerships of the decade; a year later he was cast in the leading role in
The Lady Vanishes
for Alfred Hitchcock, his film debut. Four years into the business he was an established star in both mediums.