My Life in Pieces (23 page)

Even starker in means was another event which I would rank among the supreme theatrical experiences of my life: a lecture by A. J. P. Taylor at the National Film Theatre on Hitler and film. The small bespectacled figure, raffishly bow-tied, stood in the darkened auditorium, brilliantly
illuminated in a single spot from which never moved. His argument developed with buoyant lucidity, the lines of thought arching and converging in the dark, a sort of mental callisthenics, pentathlon of the intellect, until with perfect command, he finally brought us past the final tape, all the threads of his discourse firmly in his hand. A cheer went up as the spotlight faded. What is the common element here? Performance, of course, the drama of watching a lone person justify his or her moment in the spotlight, the stage as high wire. Acting is not necessarily indispensable to theatre.

Take David Hare’s
Via Dolorosa
, of which the writer gives the last performance tonight. Hare is reporting on an actual personal experience, his trip to Israel and Palestine, but also – and this is crucial – on himself. He offers himself up for examination: this is what happens to a person, he says, when he or she goes to Israel. This is what you find, and this is how it affects you. In the very act of his standing on a stage, without even so much as a lectern, he offers himself up for examination, for contemplation. Unlike Taylor, Hare has not spent a lifetime of lecturing in public, honing his act. He is an intensely engaging speaker, witty, penetrating and often emotional, but he is not a pro in this area; much less has he acted in plays, like Harold Pinter and Wally Shawn. He walks with jagged self-consciousness onto the stage; his body jackknifes as he speaks; words and phrases come accompanied with superfluous or sometimes contradictory gestures. He lacks the actor’s whorish skill of making it seem as if he was saying all this for the first time. It’s definitely a text. Nor does he shape the material particularly well, paragraph by paragraph. It is possible to imagine the text better delivered.

All of this is beside the point. The point is that it’s him telling us about what happened to him, and in that sense the event is similar to the experience of hearing a poet read his own verse. The sense of authenticity is somehow the greater for the lack of finesse in the delivery. The same is true of the characters whom he describes: Mike Yarwood he ain’t, but you get a remarkably vivid impression of the tone, the personality, of these people and – this is the crucial point – what he thinks about them.

What he has to say about Israel and Palestine is naturally of deep interest, acute and informative. What is perhaps unexpected is how moving it is. The Israeli experience becomes cumulatively heartbreaking, and Hare the performer seems to sag under the weight of it. He pauses, sits at a table, sips water. What he has witnessed seems to pass before his eyes.
The powerlessness of passion, of intelligence, of kindness, all seems to bear him down. He wanders about the set, contemplates the impressive model of Jerusalem that rises up and hovers in mid-air like a spaceship. He looks at these things, but he does not seem to see them. An actor would relate to the set, to his surroundings, with a conscious effort of focus, but Hare is elsewhere, playing over his memories on a mental screen. When the show is over, he seems to see us for the first time, bows almost absent-mindedly and then walks all the way to the back of the stage, leaves, and then walks all the way back again.

It is as haunting as anything by Beckett. The event has become a metaphor, and
that
is what the theatre must never fail to be.

I was with Joint Stock for two highly argumentative years. My next job
after leaving the company was to play Titus Andronicus at the Bristol Old
Vic, my first Shakespeare and the first of the director, Adrian Noble.
Although I had been passionate about the plays since my childish spout
ings from Dr Dibelius’s edition, my only actual contact with the work had
been the brief and unsatisfactory experience of playing Friar Laurence
at drama school in my first year, when it was hard to tell who knew less
about what they were doing, the teacher or me. The Drama Centre had a
deep bias against Shakespeare, preferring as a matter of policy to pro
mote other Elizabethans and particularly the Jacobeans. So I had played
Cocledemoy in
The Dutch Courtesan
, and Adam Overdo in
Bartholomew Fair
, but no Shakespeare. Adrian, who was my contemporary at the
Drama Centre, may have suffered in the same way, though needless to
say he has made up for it since, as, to a lesser extent, have I.
Titus
was a
bracing experience, a wonderful place to begin my journey through
Shakespeare, since it is very early Shakespeare: in a sense we were start
ing together, the writer and I. As he learned to write, I learned to act. This
was a contribution for the Globe Theatre’s magazine
Around the Globe
in 1997.

I was just twenty-seven when I played Titus Andronicus, and it was, needless to say, the hardest thing I had ever done to that date. I suspect that it is one of the hardest parts in the canon. At that green age, though, it nearly finished me off altogether as an actor. It’s a very long part, but
stamina was not a problem of mine. The difficulty is in the length and extent of the journey that the character undergoes, from triumph to tragedy to madness to revenge, and in the evolution in style which Shakespeare himself seems to have undergone as he wrote the play. As Titus is put through more and more of Destiny’s hoops, his language passes from bombast and fustian to a sort of heroic but still formal grieving, until it breaks up completely as his mind gives under the weight of all his woes – or does it? By the end of the play he is thinking with startling clarity and focused purpose, and the language too expresses this.

The latter part of the play is in fact wonderfully easy to act; everything the actor, even the twenty-seven-year-old actor, needs is there. Who could not rise to the extraordinary pathos and indeed realism of Titus’s scenes with Lavinia, tongueless, handless, ravished:

Or:

And the extraordinary exchanges over the fly that Titus’s brother Marcus kills:

The scene in which Titus madly fires off arrows with letters attached to them to the gods has a weird jazzy energy to it that spits off the page. Told by his bewildered nephew that Pluto has urged him to wait, he cries:

All of this is perfectly recognisable human behaviour (given the extremity of the situations), expressed in a flexible, varied and inventive form. Here Shakespeare seems to have left his Senecan models completely behind; it is entirely individual in music and in thought, and Titus’s character is embodied in his verse.

The beginning of the play – or rather Titus’s beginning in it – is another matter, although it is arguable that here the expression also reflects the man and his circumstances: the war-weary hero, supreme commander, doughty warrior, servant of the state, for whom he has sacrificed many sons on the field of war: his utterance is long-breathed, rhetorical, pompous, though not without deep feeling. It is the speech of someone who is used to being listened to:

It was a hard note for a young actor to hit, that tone of weary authority, that easy massiveness. It is critical that the character makes his first entrance at the absolute height of his power and dignity if those humiliations which Saturninus heaps on him in quick succession are to register. In fact, his decline is vertiginous, quicker by far than that of Lear; it happens with
comic-book speed. Within minutes, he has slain one of his own sons who defies him, is spurned by the Emperor whom he has just endorsed, sees the Queen of the Goths whom he has just beaten in battle become the Emperor’s consort, and endures seeing two of his other sons falsely accused of murder. That is a mere prelude to what then happens: his daughter is raped and mutilated; he hacks off his own hand, in exchange for the return of his sons; and he takes delivery of those sons’ heads severed.

One damn thing after another. And Titus is heroically eloquent in his distress. Tynan’s wonderful phrase, ‘a concerto of grief’ (a concerto for left hand, in this instance), precisely expresses the musical quality of the lamentation, and it needed an actor with far greater range than I then had to find the variations within the grieving. The imagery is all watery, of tears and the sea, and in my mind’s ear I heard
The Flying Dutchman
and the waters of the Rhine, and I hurled myself at these great arias, forcing the emotional stakes higher and higher, pushing my vocal resources to breaking point. The text is conventional; neither in imagery nor in phrasing does it begin to express the individual who is grieving.

The impersonality, is, of course, part of the point: the actor needs to become a conduit for these torrential, primal emotions. How I longed for lungs of brass, a throat of steel. I wanted a
Heldentenor
’s ability to ride a hundred-piece orchestra. Knocking myself out with a sort of Method approach to the emotions, and killing myself with absurd vocal challenges, I rendered myself voiceless after three performances. Restored to some sort of audibility with dubious potions brewed by the notorious and sorely missed laryngologist Norman Punt, I had to learn to husband such feeble resources as I now had. By the end of the run, I had learned a number of invaluable lessons about Shakespeare and about myself, and was giving a reasonable lightweight account of the impossible part. I was a shrub, no cedar, I, but it was true and clear enough. I was never happier, though, than when I was mad, a state into which I sank at each performance with deep relief.

After
Titus
I was obsessed by Shakespeare and his work. In a way, it was
and probably always will be an outsider’s obsession because I started act
ing his plays late and never had the complete immersion in his work that
membership of the Royal Shakespeare Company has brought to so many
British actors. This has not stopped me from seeing the plays on every pos
sible occasion, and from greedily consuming books about him. But I am
aware that actors are still, in 2010, judged by their Shakespearean
achievements, and mine – by comparison with my friend Tony Sher, for
example – have been occasional and somewhat erratic.

With
Titus
, I celebrated five years of acting professionally, long enough
for some of my pigeons to start coming home to roost. My first two
employers reappeared in my life and each offered me something wonder
ful: Peter Farago, now associate director at Birmingham, asked me to play
Eddie, the psychiatrist in David Edgar’s play
Mary Barnes
, and Robert
Walker, now running the Half Moon Theatre in the East End of London,
offered me the title role in Brecht’s anti-Nazi, pseudo-Shakespearean
comic strip,
Arturo Ui
.
The latter caused a real sensation. Robert’s dan
gerous, sawn-off production transformed the old synagogue in Alie Street
into a metal jungle of the cities, and, as before, he encouraged me to go
further than I could possibly have imagined. Brecht offers every opportu
nity; I created a Frankenstein’s monster, put together from spare parts –
my wig discovered in the dustbins of the Royal Opera House, my nose and
Hitler moustache from a joke shop, tied on with the thread plainly visible,
my body an ape’s. Underlying it all was the soul of a malevolent clown
(some genetic influence there, perhaps). It was, I admit, a stab at Great
Acting, something which had preoccupied me for a long time, though it
was a very unfashionable notion: the very words were poison in, for exam
ple, Joint Stock. I determined to do something people would never forget.
I’m not sure whether that happened or not, but it certainly attracted atten
tion.
Mary Barnes
was a huge success, too, both in Birmingham and in
London at the Royal Court. It certainly had a great performance at its cen
tre, but it wasn’t mine. It was Patti Love’s in the title role, an account of
such unsparing emotional truthfulness that it threatened to unhinge the
actress; for my part, no acting was required – I simply responded to her.
Ironically, however, it was this performance, in
Mary Barnes
, and not my
Arturo Ui, that led to the biggest break I ever had professionally. I wrote
the following for the
Guardian
in conjunction with a revival of the play
in q
uestion in 2007.