My Life in Pieces (14 page)

Despite his splendid physical and vocal equipment – the nearest thing to an
acteur noble
this country has produced – he did not quite fit into a pre-existing mould. ‘What sort of actor do you want to be, Michael?’ Edith Evans had asked him. ‘Do you want to be like John, or Larry, or me, or Peggy Ashcroft? What sort of standards are you aiming at?’ The very highest, was his immediate answer, those of Jouvet, those of his mentor the director Michel Saint-Denis (who had, said Redgrave, ‘some information about life that he could tell us’). But he believed that could only really be achieved in an ensemble, in the sort of company that Gielgud was intermittently attempting in the West End, though ideally, he believed, the theatre should be nationalised. As for himself, he was genuinely not interested in stardom, and was a natural democrat, if a somewhat aloof one. He was also fascinated by Stanislavsky, always seeking to create from within; he was in fact that unheard-of phenomenon, an English leading actor who was not an extrovert. He was always in touch with his inner drama, in a way not dissimilar to Charles Laughton, an actor with whom he has surprisingly much in common, and his best work always possesses a sense of fathomless pools of complex life within. Unlike Laughton, his relationship to his own body and his face was not anguished; it is indeed very often the gap between the nobility of his appearance and the turbulence inside which gives his acting its extraordinary intensity. ‘He is always at his best when called upon to undermine the effect of his tall, handsome presence with suggestions of nervous tensions amounting to terror,’ wrote Frank Marcus.

His loyalty to his inner needs gave rise to an almost ungraspable complexity in his private life. He was desperately needy in his sexual and emotional demands. ‘I am shallow, selfish (horribly), jealous to a torturing degree, greedy, proud and self-centred,’ he wrote to John Lehmann; ‘I have grasped at people’s love and done vain and stupid things to get it; I am at times hideously immoral.’ An early indicator is the passionate affair that he had with Edith Evans during and even after the run of
As
You Like It
, starting in the seventh month of Rachel’s pregnancy with her first child Vanessa, and continuing thereafter for nearly a year, an affair of which Rachel remained ignorant till the publication of Bryan Forbes’s biography of Evans some forty years later. Thenceforward the affairs were with men, including at least four long-term relationships, all of which Rachel was told about to the accompaniment of copious tears, and all of which she learned to live with: indeed, she even learnt to live with
the lovers themselves. He was so infatuated with Noël Coward during their brief affair that it was with him that he spent his last night before beginning his wartime naval service. Rachel was curiously tolerant, almost unnervingly so: ‘I am glad all goes well with you, Darling Mike. Do you know, I envy you being always able to be with the one you love with
no
restrictions or difficulties of any sort. I don’t envy you in a horrid way but I hope you feel pleased in the wonderfulness of that. It must give you calm and strength.’ Of course, it gave him nothing of the kind; but it kept his inner life going. In addition to the marriage and the official lovers were unending one-night or indeed one-afternoon stands, for which purpose he had rented an office off St Martin’s Lane, plus pickups in parks and stations; later – territory not covered in Strachan’s book – he was to go into darker and darker realms sexually, usually fuelled by large quantities of alcohol. These lapses were always accompanied with terrible remorse and vows of renunciation, always broken, sometimes the very day of the diary entry that records them. This is something that goes well beyond mere bisexuality or simple promiscuity. It is an unshakable compulsion, driven by unshakable guilt and the constant need for affirmation. But it was inextricably bound up with his art. ‘I like attempting parts of men, as it were, in invisible chains.’

The miracle is that for so much of his career, until he was stopped in his tracks by Parkinson’s disease shortly after his sixtieth birthday, he remained so productive and so constantly illuminating in his work; he maintained an elegance and splendour through some of his most demanding roles and despite the unremitting intensity of his private experience. His classical roles – and in one glorious season at Stratford he played King Lear, Shylock and Antony – were absolute reinventions of the characters, but the reinvention was completely unselfconscious: he worked from profound inner promptings, his transformations organic and radical. His Antony was by all accounts a supreme account of an almost unplayable part – a man who provokes unstinting love from every other character in the play even as he destroys himself. As a director, too, he worked with exceptional taste and intelligence; and finally as a writer he wrote two of the finest books in the language about acting, and a haunting novel, about an actor and his
doppelgänger
,
The Moun
tebank’s Tale
, the epigraph to which (by Rilke) seems to tell us something very personal about the enigmatic Redgrave himself: ‘I can only come to terms with inner cataclysms; a little exterior perishing or surviving is
either too hard or too easy for me. In the life of the gods… I understand nothing better than the moment they withdraw themselves; what would a god be without the protecting cloud, can you imagine a god worse for wear?’

After
The Old Boys
, a tenth-anniversary production of the musical
Lock Up Your Daughters
, the show which originally opened the Mermaid, had
settled in for a long run and with little now to do in the box office, I spent
my days tormenting Joan with new systems for this or that, and for a
month she managed to get me to join the accounting department, which
was certainly an eye-opener, the miracle being that they hadn’t been
raided by the police. Finally, she was greatly relieved to hear of a job
going in the box office of the Aldwych Theatre, then home of the Royal
Shakespeare Company. Box Office Manager spoke unto Box Office Man
ager, and I duly started work there a week later. This was an altogether
different sort of operation from Bernard Miles’s inspired lunacy at Pud
dle Dock, where the spirit of the Elizabethan actor-managers was alive
and kicking. The RSC was more like the National, in terms of quality and
finish, but in atmosphere it was quite unlike. Apart from anything else, we
of the front of house had no contact with the actors, or the stage man
agement or the crew; there was no equivalent of Olivier’s canteen. So the
life of the front of house became the whole arena of interest. Again, in
the box office I found myself part of a highly original gang of colleagues,
from the manager, the sentimental, Wagner-loving John ‘Puss’ Ball, to the
No. 2, Vera ‘Lippy’ Lee, a feisty cockney girl with no interest whatever in
the theatre but a brilliant accounting mind, and on to Grace Turner, a for
mer Box Office Manager now rendered unsuitable for executive activities
by her staggering intake of alcohol (put to answering the phones, she
could be observed slowly sliding down the wall until she was a heap on
the floor, continuing all the while to converse with her customer) and Tina
Adami, a spinster of a certain age with an adorable tendency to collapse
in uncontrollable giggles. And the ushers were an arresting collection of
gay men, mostly young and dishy, with a sprinkling of ancient grotesques,
one of whom minced up to the box office on one of my first days on the
window and asked me a question. I can’t remember my answer but what
ever it was, it caused him to turn to his colleagues and shout back to them,
‘As a row of tents.’

The RSC of the period was a particularly glorious one; Trevor Nunn, still
in his twenties, was the director, and the repertory consisted, amongst
other things, of his own electrifying production of
The Revenger’s Tragedy
,
John Barton’s
Troilus and Cressida
and
Twelfth Night
with Judi Dench
and Donald Sinden, and a play, starring the same couple, which nobody
had heard of and whose author’s name no one could pronounce,
London Assurance
by Dion Boucicault. I saw all the previews of that, and saw
the stupendous ensemble of that time – as well as Dench and Sinden there
were Elizabeth Spriggs, Michael Williams, Barrie Ingham, Derek Smith
and old Sydney Bromley – shape and edit their work as a public that had
come on trust erupted in delirious laughter, all the more so for having had
no idea of what to expect. During the same period, Peter Brook’s
Midsummer Night’s Dream
had opened in Stratford-upon-Avon. When
the show came to the Aldwych, one saw that, wonderful though all those
other productions were, this
Midsummer’s Night’s Dream
made them
seem
vieux jeu
. Somehow, once again, Brook had reinvented the language
of the theatre, making audiences participate in the game of theatre in a
way they had forgotten how to do. That one director should have been
responsible, back to back, for the National’s
Oedipus
and this
Dream
was
astounding – although there was a bridge in the musical satyr play Brook
had tacked on to Seneca’s savage ritual, in which the company danced
deliriously around a huge golden phallus while the band played ‘Yes! We
Have No Bananas’. Brook was and is the Picasso of directors, endlessly
self-reinventing. That he should also have been able to write about it with
unprecedented clarity is a minor miracle:
The Empty Space
had just
appeared in print and now here was the living evidence of his war on
what he called in the book Deadly Theatre. Michael Kustow’s authorised
biography appeared some thirty-five years later; I reviewed it for the
Guardian.

There was an extraordinary mood among the associate directors of the RSC as they returned to London from Stratford in the spring of 1970 for one of their regular meetings. They had just seen the first night of Peter Brook’s production of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, and from my peephole in the box office of the Aldwych, I could see the thoughtful faces as they filed past on their way to the office upstairs. They realised, I concluded – having read that morning’s reviews – that Brook had done it
again: moved the goalposts for Shakespearean production, redefining himself as a director, as well as the Royal Shakespeare Company, and to some extent the Theatre itself. In his work with the actors he had set out to discover what he called ‘the secret play’, ignoring any realistic pointers in the text, banishing every traditional context in which the play had ever been performed, rejoicing in circus skills and crude music-hall gags while sounding the soaring lyricism of the verse at full throttle, blasting the famous Mendelssohn wedding march out of the loudspeakers and making absolutely clear the nature of Titania’s attraction to her donkey lover. Through all this he somehow released, in a radically abstract white box, all the play’s lewd energy, its beauty, its darkness and its light, and finally, unforgettably and heart-stoppingly, its power to heal. The acting was intensely physical, playful and passionate. Informed critics spoke of the production as Meyerholdian, and certainly what Brook had done was as fearlessly expressionistic as anything his great Russian predecessor had attempted, but it was also – though he had never done anything like it before – instantly recognisable as pure Peter Brook: rigorous, impish; theatrical, high-minded; brilliantly spontaneous, utterly achieved. It was also terribly English, and at the same time perfectly cosmopolitan.

It was the last piece of theatre Brook created as a resident of England. For the subsequent thirty-five years of his life, he has roamed the globe from his base in Paris, seeking new forms in his determination to redefine theatrical truth, aiming for a form of storytelling that transcends national cultures, tapping into the universal. In the course of these often far-flung journeys – both geographical and artistic – he has delivered a number of the key productions of the late twentieth century and provided a continuous challenge to theatrical practice. He is widely acknowledged as the greatest living director in the world today, though there are those who feel that his supreme talent – his genius, as many would have it – has been misapplied, leading the theatre not closer to its true function, but in the opposite direction, into aestheticism and, horror of horrors, mysticism. There are also those who feel he has betrayed, or at least walked away from, his particular talent. Kenneth Tynan, in his diary – not quoted in Michael Kustow’s biography – cries, ‘How I wish Peter would stop tackling huge philosophical issues and return to thing he can do better than any other English director – i.e. startle us with stage magic. I don’t want to hear Peter on anthropology any more than I would have wanted to hear Houdini on spiritualism.’ One way or the other, he has been at the heart
of the never-ending debate about the purpose of the theatre, a debate which would have been infinitely more limited without him. It is Kustow’s aim in this indispensable book to trace the trajectory of Brook’s crucial contribution to the discussion, both in his writings and in his productions. He succeeds brilliantly, and I defy anyone to read the book and not come away thinking better of the theatre, its scope, its passion, its contribution.

It is the authorised biography, which means Kustow has had access, first of all to Brook himself, an elusive interviewee, and to a fascinating correspondence with his old childhood friend, Stephen Facey, both of which illuminate the narrative. The book is chastely free of gossip, and often omits some of the human mess that accompanies experiment of any sort, and, more surprisingly, some of the crises that Brook himself records in his autobiography
Threads of Time
(where he disarmingly tells us how close to disaster
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
came). Kustow has worked with Brook, on and off, and in many capacities, for over forty years; from this perspective of easy familiarity, he has set out to lay Brook’s career before us with clarity and sympathy, and in simply doing that, he offers a narrative as extraordinary as the sort of epic fable that the latter-day Brook has favoured for theatrical treatment. It is by no means a hagiography, but neither is it an intimate biography; certainly there is no attempt at psychoanalysis. In fact, the Brook Kustow presents to us, though altogether exceptional, is not especially complex; indeed, the portrait of the artist as a young man that Kustow offers is unexpectedly racy. Though he was conscious, as the son of Russian Jews, of his differentness from his fellow students first at Westminster then at Gresham’s public schools, his early life was one of material comfort, intellectual stimulation and constant encouragement. He was blessed with a relationship with his father which was wholly positive (his mother cuts a slightly less engaging figure), as a result of which he knew nothing ‘of the rejection of the father figure that is so much part of our time’. His intellectual precocity was encouraged (he read
War and Peace
at the age of nine) but not unduly spotlit. Stepping forth from the bosom of his family secure in his sense of being loved and wholly lacking in the typical Englishman’s instinct to apologise for his very existence, he took to the theatre with easy and instant mastery; there is no hint of neurosis about him whatever, nor is he driven by anything other than an awareness of his own brilliance and a determination to do justice to it. ‘For my first thirty years,’ Brook says, ‘I had nothing to connect with the phrase “inner life”. What
was “inner life”? There was life. Everything was one hundred per cent extrovert.’