My Life in Pieces (20 page)

The second pillar of the British theatre, experience – practising the job – was, also until quite recently, widely available not only in the metropolis, with the largest number of theatres of any city in the world, but across the country in an even larger number of theatres: every town had its own, and many of them had permanent acting companies, as much a part of the town’s identity as the local football team, in which the actors would develop and grow before the very eyes of the audience. There were touring companies, too, and many Theatre-in-Education groups. Thousands and thousands of opportunities for actors to consolidate their craft and to forge their individual contribution to the theatre as a whole. All this has not totally disappeared, but it is a shadow of what it was. There is no longer a training ground or a breeding ground for actors.

With the erosion of these two flagstones, the third foundation – education – has become all the more important. Until the end of the nineteenth century, the theatre was essentially a family business; actors were, in the most literal sense, born and not made. Training, a relatively recent
development in England, came, at the turn of the twentieth century, out of the profession itself. Supported by all the leading actors of the day and many of its playwrights, the early drama schools boldly trumpeted the seriousness of the profession’s intention of working on itself. Soon, a whole new generation of trained players emerged, which in a very short space of time brought on what is now spoken of as a golden age of actors – Olivier, Gielgud, Richardson, Guinness, Ashcroft – all of whom trained in some form of drama school. What did they have that their untrained predecessors lacked?

I would put it in a simple phrase: the possibility of going further. The old method of learning how to be an actor was built on observation and imitation; it was, essentially, an apprenticeship. You entered the profession at a lowly level, you learned how to make the most of what you’d got, you watched the leading actors like a hawk, seeing how they got their effects. You developed by doing. You formed your own ideas about what the job entailed. You discovered what worked and what didn’t. Sometimes you got advice. It was a pragmatic, rough and ready, Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest sort of a business. Like anyone struggling with a language, you expressed what you were able to express – not what you wanted to say. Most people settled for what they felt comfortable with. Extraordinary talents and personalities emerged, of course, but the majority of the profession was resigned to filling in, to being a backdrop; the sense of an ensemble, of a group of people working together to create the theatrical moment, all contributing something unique, was elusive. The extraordinary ones – the geniuses – didn’t need training (although it wouldn’t have harmed them). It was the rest of us who did – the other 97.5 per cent.

The first and most important thing about training is that it enables an actor to work on him or herself within a controlled and protected environment. In enables you to make a fool of yourself, to expose yourself, among equally exposed and vulnerable people under the guidance of someone who knows. It enables you to develop – physically, vocally, expressively – over a period of time during which you will at first be expected to deliver nothing, to show nothing and to prove nothing. You will be learning, growing, exploring on a carefully planned journey towards certain clear goals, each stage of which is noted and built on. You will discover – we all discover – that some things come easy and some hard; you will learn which is which and how to make the most of the one and to work against the other.

You will, inevitably, find out a great deal about yourself which may at first be bewildering and unwelcome, but which will almost certainly in the end liberate you, as the truth, squarely faced, invariably does. Your time at drama school enables you to engender certain habits of mind, an approach and an analysis which enables you to delve deep into the play and character on which you may be working, to ask questions and maybe find answers about the kind of theatre that you believe in. You will learn to live with language in all its many forms in a way that the whole temper of the times denies. You will learn how to access and use parts of your body and your brain and your emotions that you scarcely knew existed. You will discover rhythm and tempo, absent for the most part from daily life. You will learn to look at life with the keen eye of someone who has to reproduce it. You will learn, as Brecht said, to drink a cup of tea in forty different ways. You will spend three years with the same group of people, watching them develop, learning how to accommodate to them and adjust to them and how to challenge them in an unthreatening way. You will discover the different responsibilities of carrying a play as the leading actor, and of providing its support and foundation in a small, perhaps wordless role. You will have to think about history, about the past, the present and the future, and you will have to ask why the theatre has been central to the life of society for more than two-and-a-half thousand years.

And at the end of it all, you will just about be able to say, ‘The carriage awaits, my lord.’ But if you can say it as if you meant it, in such a way that we know who you are and where you’ve come from and why you’re there; that we have an inkling of which sort of society you belong to and what sort of play you’re in; if you are able to command our interest absolutely but without drawing irrelevant attention to yourself – then you will have done brilliantly out of your three years’ training.

Everything that I’ve said applies just as much to film acting as it does to the theatre, but not only do I entirely endorse the well-known observation that if you can act on stage, you can act on film, but by no means necessarily vice versa, I also believe that the theatre has a special importance because it is a much more democratic art than film. It is often denounced as elitist, by which people mean it costs too much (and of course it does), but it is the opposite of elitist because it is above all an interactive art. It happens live in front of an audience, whose input becomes a crucial part of the show. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ Max Wall used to say every night at the end of his show, ‘you have been half.’ And they are. At the very least.
The theatre offers itself up for judgement and response, and it cannot ignore either of these things. Theatre stands up on its own two feet and says: ‘Look at this, ladies and gentlemen! This is what life is like!’, inviting the immemorial response: ‘Oh no it isn’t!’ But the debate has been engaged in the most vivid, the most physical terms; the model of society is flesh and blood, not mechanical.

Theatre in the West grew out of democracy, was an essential part of it. The whole city, without exception, came to see the play. It was their story. And it still is. The city demands actors who are up to its cruel demands, actors who have the stamina to offer their brilliant skills and deep human truths, in the flesh, night after night. And that is what training is for.

I left the Drama Centre a week before the end of my final term. Com
pletely to my surprise, I had got a job, not from any of the thousand
companies to whom I had sent my very attractive photo and fascinating
personal particulars, nor from any of the terminally depressed directors
for whom I had auditioned, but from a visiting director who had seen a
second-year acting exercise I had done and had decided that I was ripe
for his company, the Young Lyceum in Edinburgh. This wise, perceptive,
inspired individual was Peter Farago, to whom I remain for ever indebted.

My experience of the theatre proved to be quite different from anything
for which my training had prepared me. In my first play, I was the front
end of a horse (in Büchner’s
Woyzeck
, to be fair), and in the second,
appeared as an extra in
The Thrie Estates
by Sir David Lindsay of the
Mount, whose cast was, in effect, the entire Scottish acting profession, a
formidable sight, ranged across the wide-open spaces of the Assembly
Hall.

This was a new kind of actor to me. More than it does now, to be an actor
in Scotland then meant to be multiskilled: survival was dependent on ver
satility. They could all – or almost all – sing, dance, do stand-up comedy,
panto, blank verse, several Scots accents and standard English, direct,
write, and design; and they all did all of these things in every medium
known to man. Several actors in this resounding fourteenth-century alle
gory, dug up by Tyrone Guthrie for the first Edinburgh Festival, were huge
national stars, but they all gave themselves over to it with fantastic
esprit de corps
. The entire Scottish profession, in fact, was a sort of company;
everyone knew everyone else. At first, I felt terribly English. But the con
viviality of the profession immediately asserted itself: lifelong friends were
made and a lifelong love of Scotland established, despite the horrors of
Calvinist cuisine circa 1973. And the varied challenges of the Rumanian
avant-garde (
Woyzeck
was directed by the great Radu Penciulescu) and
sprawling on the steps of the Assembly Hall with neither lines nor char
acter, nevertheless attempting to make a contribution, were met and
lessons duly learned.

After Edinburgh, I segued into rep, which, in 1973, still existed on a
nationwide basis; its subsequent decline has had dire consequences. Apart
from robbing communities of their own acting team, for which they could
root and whose progress they could monitor, its disappearance has denied
actors a crucial complement to their training. In rep you learn to think very
quickly and decisively, you discover your limitations (and your strengths),
you find out how to work over a span of time with other people with
whom you may very possibly have nothing in common, you figure out how
to deal with directors. You lack the conditions for creating deeply medi
tated work, but it is astounding how much can be done under such
unpropitious circumstances; and if one can get that far in those circum
stances, how much farther could one not go with just a little more time, a
little more money, a slightly bigger cast? Yet when the pressure is off,
somehow the focus diffuses. I’m not sure whether ‘focus’ is quite the word
for what we had in Lincoln, but we did keep the show on the road. Just.
This piece was written for the
Guardian
in 2004.

Christmas of 1973/’74:it was the best of times; it was the worst of times. On the one hand, it was a freezing winter in the midst of the miners’ strike and Edward Heath’s three-day week; on the other, I was twenty-four years old and in hog heaven, theatrically speaking. I was a leading actor at the Theatre Royal Lincoln, only three months after leaving drama school, and had already played major part after major part. Business had been so-so; astonishing, really, in the economic circumstances, that it had held up at all. But now, in December, we were about to embark on the shows which would justify our existence in the town and make it possible for the company to survive for the rest of the year:
A Christmas Carol
, playing mostly to parties of schoolchildren, and
Aladdin
, playing to families.
A Christmas Carol
went with a swing in rehearsal, mingling pity and terror with low comedy. The latter was my particular contribution: I was playing Bob Cratchit and Mr Fezziwig and countless other larger-than-life characters and romped through it all with the naked energy and shameless exhibitionism of extreme youth. We shrieked our way through rehearsals; Chris Ryan (later of
The Young Ones
on television) was playing Scrooge and we vied with each other in outrageous invention. We soon learned that to catch each other in the eye was fatal – so of course we caught each other in the eye as much as possible. Getting on
stage and dealing with the set sobered us up a bit. It was a beautiful, complex piece of work – miraculous, considering the budget – an affair of lifts and traps and moving scenery, wonderful in action, but it took some negotiating.

Snow drifts were achieved by scattering crumbled polystyrene from the flies overhead. At the dress rehearsal, as I joyously raised my voice to belt out ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing’, I sucked in a mouthful of the stuff, inhaling more up my nostrils, and was suddenly unable to breathe. Young audiences may have been somewhat shocked by the sight of the kindly Bob Cratchit ramming his fingers down his throat and vigorously emitting projectile vomit into the wings, rather in the manner, some years later, of Linda Blair in
The Exorcist
, but we had no time for niceties of etiquette; the show must go on, whatever.

On another occasion, during the party at the Fezziwigs’ house, just as Mrs Fezziwig (Thea Ranft) and I riotously led the assembled company round the stage in a brisk cotillion, we suddenly found ourselves hurtling some fifteen feet through the floor. The stage trap had given way under us. An awful silence fell on stage. Thea and I reassured each other in our pit that we were not dead and then became aware of ten horrified faces staring gingerly into the trap. ‘Down in the wine cellar, again, Mr Fezziwig, ho ho?’ one of the actors gamely ventured, while another, her face frozen in a rictus of reassuring delight, signalled desperately to the stage manager to bring the curtain in, but he too was paralysed with disbelief. Fuelled by adrenalin, Thea and I briskly shinned up the ladder pinned to the side of the understage and shortly appeared, bleeding and blinking. The little ones in the audience must have been baffled because the figure that now appeared from the hole in the stage was not Mr Fezziwig, but, unmistakably, Bob Cratchit, since the only things which had distinguished the one character from the other – the wig, side-whiskers and spectacles – had come off in the fall. Regardless, I assumed with demented vivacity the bent posture and wheezing vocals of dear old Fezziwig and vigorously launched into ‘God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen’, cotillioning madly offstage, where Thea and I could finally collapse in painful laughter.

There was worse. The day before Christmas Eve I arrived at the theatre at nine o’clock in the morning for the first of that day’s three performances, to be greeted by the director with the news that Chris had a fever of 103° and no voice: either the little ones must be sent away, bitterly disappointed, their Christmas outing ruined, or I must go on for him as
Scrooge. I was aghast. I barely knew my own parts, let alone his. For a minute and a half I allowed myself and everyone else to believe that the little ones would indeed be disappointed, could, in fact, sod themselves as far as I was concerned; seconds later I was being bundled into the character’s padding, nightshirt and heavy Victorian suit. Before I knew it I was staggering about the stage, inventing Dickensian dialogue, being pushed in and out of the light by the director, who had come on stage with me as an Angel. The experience of acting a scene with another actor playing Bob Cratchit, saying the very lines to me I had myself said only the day before, and me answering him in the lines that until yesterday someone else had been saying to me, was severely hallucinatory; it must have been even weirder for him: the poor chap had been roped in that morning while passing through, visiting his girlfriend.

I lost half a stone that day. Fortunately there was only one more day to go, Christmas Eve, and after the performances we could do the technical rehearsal of the pantomime and then go home to our Christmas beds and our Christmas Day off. We would have done, too, had not the designer, overwhelmed by the scale of his task, panicked and decamped (the
mot
juste
, I think). This exotic young man, known as Diane – his name was Moshe – had spent the budget on a flimsy physical structure he had knocked up in the workshop before setting off back to London, never to return, and a great deal of luminous paint, glue, glitter, and gilded seersucker fabric, which we found, hidden at the back of the set. There was nothing for it but to start decorating, which we did, until we dropped (having already given three
Christmas Carols
that day) at about four in the morning. We crawled home, and then did our best to pretend that it was Christmas. I was sharing my flat with an actress who was, much to the dismay of her young son, macrobiotic: roast tofu with all the trimmings was our distinctly unDickensian repast.

Edward Heath did the rest. Television came to an end at ten o’clock, and a post-tofu walk down Lincoln High Street only deepened the gloom, since the Christmas lights which had been hung up were never lit, thanks to the fuel restrictions. At about six o’clock in the evening, we’d gone into the theatre and done a few hours on the set, and this, in its way, was the high spot of the day, inspired by the Dunkirk spirit, and a certain amount – a large amount – of other spirits, too. The next day, Boxing Day, we crawled into the theatre at 9 a.m. and finished the job off, discreetly adjusting the perhaps somewhat exuberant execution of the day before.
It all sort of fell into place. I was on first as Abanazar – ‘Ha! Ha! Ha! HA! By the Ninth Book of the Nephritic Pentacles, I summon the genie! Ha! Ha!’ – and so on,
ad libitum
. This was accompanied by a flash of flame from something called flash wool. Needless to say, the designer had omitted to order it, and the young stagehand in charge of it had improvised something. It was his job to light it, then beat a hasty retreat as the curtain rose. On this first performance, he duly lit it. There was an enormous explosion which rooted him to the spot, at the same time brilliantly lighting his soot-covered hands and face. ‘Oh fook!’ he cried. This was thus the opening line of
Aladdin
in Lincoln, Christmas 1973. ‘Oh fook,’ indeed.

For me the great thing about Lincoln was that I had found my director. Or
rather, he had found me. Robert Walker, who had been running the Close,
the studio space of the Glasgow Citizens’ Theatre, and before that had
been electrifying the citizens of Watford with his work at the Palace The
atre, had, like Peter Farago, seen me at the Drama Centre and invited me
to be in his opening season at Lincoln in September 1973, immediately
after the Edinburgh Festival.

The directors I had had in Edinburgh were as different from each other as
they could possibly have been: Bill Bryden, sharp, smart and Scottish, had
handled his somewhat unruly gang (‘No, no, Bill, Sir Tyrone always had
me move
right
here’) with aplomb and energy, but there was no time for
nuance and personal touches; Radu Penciulescu was an intellectual and a
teacher and an experimentalist, and very very clear about what he
wanted, though he spoke no English and communicated his observations in
French, which I, the new boy in the company, translated for him.

Robert Walker was something altogether different, a huge, rather beauti
ful man with the physique of a rugby player, in love with language,
exceptionally well-read and entirely on top of all the theories of drama,
wildly, surreally funny and playful to the point of anarchy. Above all he
wanted the theatre to be alive with a crazy, reckless sensuality; sex had to
be at the back of everything, for him, which led to some unusual depar
tures when we were doing
Aladdin
. The inventiveness and audacity of his
rehearsals were thrilling and liberating. He was utterly and totally actor-
struck – actor-struck as opposed to stage-struck. Everything he did – the
design, the music, the staging – flowed out of what the actors were doing.
And we dared recklessly for him, carried along by his joy in our work. He
was the best audience any actor could ever hope for, agog at what we
came up with, ruthless at editing it. He was not without rigour of a sort –
a poetic rigour, which demanded perpetual spontaneity and heightened
awareness. He would countenance anything except what was wooden and
mechanical; he also had a hatred of what is usually called beauty. Beauty
to him was whatever was smudged, raw, naked. Finish and polish were
hateful to him. This was a wholly new concept to me: I was a homosex
ual aesthete, after all. But I trusted him and came to see that this sawn-off
beauty of his was indeed poetry of a different order. He himself was poly
morphously perverse, like some magnificently articulate baby, endlessly
stretching out and touching, all appetite and no inhibition, and his theatre
was like that, too. Swept on by his enthusiasm and permissiveness, I
soared. It seemed impossible for me to displease him. I managed, just
about, to hang on to the logic and discipline of what I had learned at the
Drama Centre, while taking more and more risks.

The panto (see above) might have been a risk too far. The audience openly
rebelled at times. Things were looking a bit rocky at Lincoln by then.
Business – apart from the Christmas shows – had not been good; Howard
Brenton’s rewritten
Measure for Measure
, with the Duke as Harold
Macmillan, Angelo as Enoch Powell and a black Isabella, had emptied the
place, and the local council was asking for more familiar fare, done more
normally. Robert was deflated and enraged, as he often was, by being
required to be realistic. So when Peter Farago of the Young Lyceum, my
first boss, asked me to go back to Edinburgh, Robert told me to go; a couple
of months later he threw in the towel too. Lincoln was my only real
experience of rep; it was probably enough, but it was a wonderful time,
absurdly overworked, but bursting with camaraderie and good humour
and broken hearts and discovery. One of the great discoveries of that time
for me, an extra-curricular one, was Max Wall. I came face to face with
the music-hall tradition which was, so to speak, in my blood, but of which
till then I had had no direct experience. I wrote this for the Max Wall
Society’s organ,
Wallpaper.