My Life in Pieces (22 page)

Not long after the West End production of
Schippel
had folded, in 1975,
I had gone back to the Open Space Theatre, a remarkable organisation
(long gone, of course) situated on the Tottenham Court Road next to a
couple of ‘adult’ cinemas. Thelma Holt, an excellent actress, had created
the circumstances at the Open Space to enable the maverick American
director Charles Marowitz, Peter Brook’s quondam assistant, to stage a
succession of provocative pieces – collages of Shakespeare, pastiches of
Oscar Wilde, Picasso’s great play
Four Little Girls
, new work by Peter
Barnes and Trevor Griffiths – which were like nothing else that was being
done at the time, literate but deeply radical. They presented plays at
lunchtime, too, and in that slot Thelma and Charles decided to do
Down Red Lane
, a horribly prophetic piece by B. S. Johnson about a diner eating
himself to death in a restaurant (Johnson met his own death by striding
out into the sea after having eaten as much Indian food as he could cram
down his gullet). In the play, I was the waiter and Martin Coveney, brother
of the critic, played the diner’s stomach. The diner himself was played by
Timothy West, then one of the best-known actors in the country (
Edward VII
had just been on television, and he was currently playing Judge Brack
to Glenda Jackson’s Hedda at the Aldwych for the RSC); this was typical
of the fringe of the time, where the most famous and distinguished actors
were only too delighted to do a quick run of a play. But it was also typical
of Tim, who quite unselfconsciously treated the two unknown young actors
he was working with as his equals, simply colleagues.

After
Down Red Lane
, I did a play by John Antrobus at the Royal Court
(with a cast that now exists mainly as obituaries: Richard Beckinsale, Ian
Charleson, Philip Stone, Patience Collier, as well as the happily still living
Denis Lawson, Beth Morris and Cheryl Cooke) and then a starry revival,
with a now equally melancholy cast list: Derek Godfrey, James Villiers,
Nigel Hawthorne, of
The Doctor’s Dilemma
at one of my Alma Maters,
the Mermaid. It wasn’t an altogether happy production: Derek, the daz
zling original Earl of Gurney, as it happens, in Peter Barnes’s
The Ruling Class
, was subdued, already suffering from the cancer that killed him,
while Jimmy Villiers was very put out about working on Good Friday. ‘I’m
sorry, Jimmy,’ said Robert Chetwyn, the director, ‘I’d no idea you were
religious.’ ‘Fuck religion, darling,’ said Villiers, ‘it’s the races.’ But Nigel
Hawthorne, on the brink of national fame in
Yes, Minister
, gave an exqui
site performance as Cutler Walpole. This is my 2002 review for the
Daily Mail
of his posthumously published autobiography
Straight Face.

There is in the public mind some idea of what actors are like. I suppose it is summed up by the loathed phrase ‘luvvie’: bombastic, over-the-top, compulsive, shallow, gushing, posturing, self-promoting, raffish, promiscuous, loudly laughing, uncontrollably weeping, always ‘on’. There may indeed be actors who fall within the parameters of this unlovely image – perhaps some of us see it staring back at us when we look into the mirror – but one who most certainly did not was Nigel Hawthorne, an actor as far from the popular conception as could be imagined. Slow, shy, thoughtful, stubborn, principled, middle-class and proud of it, he deviated from the norm in only two ways: he was an actor, and he was gay. Nothing in his background or his upbringing encouraged or accounted for these uncommon proclivities, but, typically, he accepted his destiny in both departments and doggedly tried to make a go of it. In both areas, it was a tough journey, with a slow start, until he achieved simultaneous glory in both, at the age of fifty, when he became famous as an actor and met the true love of his life.

His story, as told by him, is a curious, in some ways a sad one. The words ‘disappointment’, ‘disappointing’, ‘disappointed’ chime through the book like a tolling bell, as do, only slightly less frequently, two others: ‘guilt’
and ‘guilty’. His early struggle as an actor does not tell the usual rackety but romantic tale of wild indulgence, the sowing of wild oats, artistically and amorously: it is a terrible stop-go affair of small breaks leading nowhere and crushes which were unexpressed or unfulfilled. He seems plagued with ill-luck and wrong choices. After a messy and failed one-night stand with a scenic designer when he is in rep in Northampton, he decides to move in with the man, and stays with him for twenty-seven years in a relationship devoid of sex and fraught with social difficulty. As an actor, he is told, even before he becomes a professional, that it will take him years before he will make his mark; and it does – decades of mere subsistence. Then, by sheer dint of sticking at it, the actor and the parts find each other, and the talent that had never been in question finds its outlet, and overnight he is one of the most admired, best-loved performers in the country. And at almost exactly the same time, he meets the drop-dead gorgeous Trevor Bentham, who, to Nigel’s disbelief, falls in love with him, and he finds the thing he has dreamed of all his life – domestic bliss. And then he dies.

The tenacity is astonishing. Never was there such a story of persistence rewarded. The sadness that pervades the book comes from a nagging sense that it all should have happened much, much earlier. Those of us who remember his work from the mid-Sixties were never in any doubt that he was an exceptionally fine actor. He felt underused – stuck in character roles of no consequence – but already there was about his acting a sort of inner pressure, an emotional rage behind the comedy, which singled him out as an original. In life, even in those days, he was cautious and respectable and slightly crusty, but just beneath the surface there was a certain element of anarchy, determination and need warring with each other, which produced the tension that any remarkable performance must have, a pull in opposite directions. This quality led to what I continue to think of as his greatest performance (though there is some competition): Major Flack in
Privates on Parade
, where he endowed the erratic field commander with a touch of madness which was both hilarious and touching, and ascended at times almost to tragic proportions: he made us deeply pity the absurd man. In a way, it was the King Lear he didn’t quite manage to give when he finally came to play it.

Perhaps the most affecting but also the saddest moment in the book is contained in his last few lines: after he and Bentham were crudely and pointlessly outed by the press, ‘we both believed the world would be
looking at us with disgust and that our lives had been irrevocably changed. Things did change – but for the better. We no longer felt the need to pretend. The “Straight Face” we’d worn through the years was no longer necessary. Everybody knew. We’d been liberated.’ All those years of hiding, of feeling ashamed, and guilty: wasted. Nobody minded. He was loved, not for pretending to be straight but because he was a wonderful actor. If only he’d known that earlier.

The book is deeply honest without being in any way sensational. There are some very funny and very moving sections (his emotional breakdown when he came to act the climax of
Shadowlands
), and his doggedness is sometimes unintentionally funny; a latent tetchiness keeps breaking through. There is no attempt to conceal it. The author’s self-portrait is superbly complemented by Trevor Bentham’s epilogue (the best writing in the book), in which he tells us, utterly convincingly, what an enchantingly contradictory man Nigel was, and why he provoked the love that he did, in Trevor and in the great public. A most unusual account of a most unusual actor.

Nigel belonged to a generation that had good reason to fear being identi
fied as gay. By the time I became an actor, the Labouchère Amendment
had been repealed for a good six years, and life was loosening up for gay
people. I had never concealed my homosexuality from anyone (apart from
my mother, fearing an absolute cataclysm). I had told everyone about it
at school – though my sexuality was theoretical at that point, since I had
not had sex with anyone of any gender – and had made a full and free
confession of it to my chums at the National (though still a virgin). The
same candour had applied in Belfast, at university, though I was now the
oldest homosexual virgin in the land, and at the Drama Centre, where I
finally (phew!) lost my cherry. At the Vic, everyone knew who the gay
actors were, though none – apart from John Gielgud, for obvious reasons
– was publicly identified as such. It never occurred to me to conceal my
proclivities. When I became an actor, the same was true. But there was
now no danger, no disadvantage: as far as I know, there was no director
who would fail to hire you because you were gay. On the other hand, there
was, as far as I knew, no well-known actor who had admitted to being
gay in an interview. Anxiety hedged the subject. When I was asked to
appear in Martin Sherman’s
Passing By
, for Gay Sweatshop at the Almost 
Free Theatre (you paid what you could afford), I paused for a moment,
wondering what the consequences might be for my relationship with my
mother. I had no other anxiety: although scarcely what you might call a
political animal, I could see that this was an important, useful venture;
besides, it was a great part – young and in love with a beautiful young
man: I could relate to that. By no means all the actors who worked for Gay
Sweatshop were gay, so it wasn’t a public admission of homosexuality;
but there would be newspaper coverage, reviews and so on, which my
mother might well see. Very well, I thought. Destiny has forced my hand,
and I set off to break the glad tidings. ‘If you’re anything like your father,’
she responded, when I told her, ‘you’ll be a sexual beast, and since there
were no women, there must have been men.’ I took this as a blessing, and
went on my way. I would cross the next bridge – being interviewed – when
I came to it. If I came to it.

Passing By
was my first experience of political theatre. Though in essence
a very sweet account of a passing love affair between two young men, it
was utterly radical in offering no apology or explanation for the affair –
it was just an affair, like any other. The effect on the predominantly gay
audience was sensational – they wept, not because it was sad, but
because it was the first time they’d seen their own lives represented on
stage without inverted commas, with neither remorse nor disgust. Mart
Crowley’s
Boys in the Band
– ‘Show me a happy homosexual and I’ll show
you a gay corpse’ – had been packing them in, gay and straight, in the
West End only a couple of years before: the acceptable face of homosex
uality – brittle, anguished, self-loathing.
Passing By
was the antidote to
this seductive but poisonous brew. I was shaken by the effect the play had
on the audience. I knew all about political theatre – I had seen the best
(7:84) and the worst (7:84) – and was properly electrified, when it was
good, by its rousing, invigorating quality.
Passing By
was none of these. It
provoked in its audience a huge collective sigh, as if sloughing off a cen
turies-old interdict. The defensive, the reflexive, the self-protective mask
was shed, and shy, tender, loving emotion flowed gently round the tiny
auditorium. The slight play had the power, like a great popular song, of
speaking directly not only to, but for, its auditors.

Not much later, I became a company member of another explicitly polit
ical theatre group, Joint Stock. Here the relationship with the audience was
very different, and indeed those of us putting on the plays had a very dif
ferent relati
onship to each other. Gay Sweatshop’s objectives, initially, at
any rate, were very simple: to put gay life on stage from a gay point of
view, for the benefit of other gay people. The problem with Joint Stock, an
organisation which produced a great deal of remarkable theatre, was that
nobody ever articulated the precise political position that we were sup
posed to be taking. The success of David Hare’s
Fanshen
, created before
I joined the company, had convinced the company that its outlook was
essentially Maoist, but it wasn’t (though our starry-eyed uncritical
embrace of Communist China is a little embarrassing in retrospect). Very
good work was done nonetheless, especially – during my time with the
company – Barrie Keeffe’s superb
A Mad World My Masters
, one of the
few really successful large-scale social comedies of the period.

It was David Hare who had brought me into the company. His brilliant
self-assurance, his incisive wit and his extreme displeasure at being crit
icised sometimes mask his compassion and generosity, his delicious sense
of fun and his deep personal vulnerability. Our lives have run parallel
without ever really interlinking since those early Joint Stock days, but I
have always been astonished by his fearlessness about moving into terri
tory of maximum personal challenge. I wrote this in my Diary column in
the
Independent
after seeing his play
Via Dolorosa
in 1998.

Theatre: what is it? Definition is elusive and finally, perhaps, impossible. Theatre, you might say, is whatever takes place on a stage and is compelling. It is clear that plays as such are not the
sine qua non
of theatre. Among the most extraordinary pieces of theatre I have ever seen, a performance entitled
Milva Canta Brecht
, staged by Giorgio Strehler, springs to mind. The great Italian cabaret singer with her Titian-red hair, dressed in black, stood alone next to a grand piano. Her hair was up to start with; at a certain point, it came down like a copper gash across her shoulder. We gasped. The light changed. She sat down; she stood in profile; she sang with her back to us. Nothing more happened, or could happen. Her connection with what she was singing, her characterisation, her engagement with the text, creating action out of the emotional narrative, made for a theatrical event of extraordinary purity.